The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Political Science THE WORKING SELF AND THE SUBJECT OF FREEDOM: MICHEL FOUCAULT’S ANALYTICS OF LIBERALISM AND THE WORK ETHIC AS A TECHNIQUE OF LIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY A Thesis in Political Science by George V. Davis 2005 George V. Davis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2005 The thesis of George Vivien Davis was reviewed and approved* by the following: Nancy Love Associate Professor of Political Science Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Holloway Sparks Assistant Professor of Political Science Marie Hojnacki Associate Professor of Political Science John Christman Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel W. Conway Professor of Philosophy Donna L. Bahry Professor of Political Science Head of the Department of Political Science *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT In this dissertation I explore how the work ethic plays an important role in the government of modern life, specifically, how we use it to govern ourselves and govern others. First, I consider how Foucault's concept of government as "conduct of conduct" can be useful in coming to terms with the ways in which liberalism (as an art of government that is always suspicious of governing too much) governs, even in those spaces usually considered "free from" government. Using Foucault's notion of government, and the related notion of governmentality reveals ways that we are governed "beyond the state," i.e., through various techniques of the self and techniques of domination. Second, this dissertation provides an overview of Foucault's "critical ontology" of liberalism; Foucault’s work on disciplinary power and bio-politics, I argue, provides a useful critique that reveals how the space of freedom is actually constituted by specific political practices and how the production of this space assumes a specific kind of liberal subject, which is the product of disciplinary and bio-political regimes. Assessing Foucault’s body of work though this "governmentality" lens reveals a more continuous line of thought concerned not only with power and subjectivity, but also government. Finally, I use this Foucault inspired approach to political theory to examine how the work ethic operates as a technique of liberal government in the contemporary United States. Specifically, I focus on how the work ethic has informed psychiatric definitions of normality and how our assumptions about normal subjectivity have led to an individualization of the causes of poverty and unemployment, further marginalizing the iv poor and unemployed. Ultimately we must rethink the nature of freedom with the knowledge that we are never truly "free from" government. By engaging in what Foucault calls a critical ontology of our limits, we might begin to grasp how things as seemingly benign as the work ethic govern us in specific ways and how we use them to force others to govern themselves accordingly. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The Problem of Class 4 The Problem of Work 12 The Problem of Government I 18 The Problem of Government II 22 Chapter 2: Liberalism and the Government of Freedom 28 Government and Governmentality 29 Technologies of Government 31 A Brief History of Governmentality 34 Liberalism and the Government of Freedom 40 Chapter 3: Disciplinary Power and the Techniques of Governing the Liberal Individual 51 Disciplinary Power: an Overview 52 Disciplinary Power as Infra-Law 57 Discipline, Domination, and the Work Ethic 67 Governing the Ways of Being Free 73 Discipline, Self-Technology and the Work Ethic 78 Chapter 4: Bio-Power and the Reproduction of Liberal Subjects 86 Bio-power and the Problem of Population 86 Bio-power, Population, and the Working Subject 92 Bio-political Techniques of the Self 96 Bio-political Techniques of Domination 107 Race, Gender, and the Bio-politics of Class 120 vi Chapter 5: The Subject of Recent Liberalism 126 How to Define Contemporary Liberalism 127 Techniques of the Contemporary Liberal Self 134 Contemporary Liberal Techniques of Domination 138 Differentiated Freedom: Power and Subjectivity in Contemporary Liberalism 144 Chapter 6: Techniques of American Governmentality: 150 Toward a Genealogy of the Work Ethic 150 Where to Begin a Genealogy of the Work Ethic 152 Psychiatric Knowledge and Economic Freedom: Smuggling the Work Ethic into Scientific Discourse 156 Work and Domination 161 Techniques of the Working Self in Contemporary Liberalism 169 Empowering the Work Ethic: 173 The Work Ethic and Advanced Liberal Governmentality 180 Chapter 7: Conclusion: 185 Bibliography: 190 Chapter 1 Introduction I come from working people. My grandparents, on both sides, were working people. My paternal grandparents were farmers, small family farmers of the sort that are, at best, on the endangered list. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a factory worker, a machinist. In the milieu of the nineteen fifties affluence, my maternal grandparents may have even bumped their heads against the middle-class, at least in the small, rural St. Lawrence River community where they lived. On both sides, my grandmothers worked, even in an age in which uncommon for a woman to do so. Up until her death in the mid-seventies, my paternal grandmother was the foundation that kept the family farm functioning. She was the first one to the barn every morning and the last one to bed every night; she fed the livestock and the children, cleaned the gutters and the dishes. When she died in nineteen seventy-six, my grandfather stopped farming, claiming that he could not imagine continuing without her; he meant that in more ways than one. My mom’s mom was a small-business woman who operated her own beauty shop well into her eighties. It took two heart attacks to stop her. My parents worked too, each in their own way. My mother has done nothing but work her whole life. Her first real job was as a nurse in a small rural hospital; she’s still there. But it hasn’t been that easy. There are not many small, rural hospitals around these days, and this one barely is. She’s worked the day shift, the night shift, the ER, and the geriatric ward. At one point she worked her way up to an administrative position, as 2 purchasing director, a job that finally gave her weekends off. She was also a single parent, raising two children in Reagan’s America—one job often wasn’t enough. At various times in my life my mother has been a waitress, bartender, hostess, and a caterer, all the while getting up every morning and walking (often through harsh Northern New York winters) to the hospital, usually arriving a good hour before she had to, just because it was the right thing to do. Like so many other working Americans, my mother’s also been downsized and outsourced. After her hospital was integrated into a larger, urban medical corporation, there was no need for an onsite purchasing director. My mother’s administrative vacation was over, and she took her severance and months of accumulated sick time without complaint. She wasn’t away long, however. Without missing a beat, and with limited options available, my mother reactivated her nursing license and returned to where she started, working the floor, often on the night shift, again without once complaining about it. My mother is now a cancer survivor, and an anecdote might explain my mother’s relationship to work better than words could: I called her after her first day of radiation treatment. Her appointment was at 8:00am, in a city forty minutes from where she lives. I called at 10:00am, taking a chance she might already be home. She was, my step-father reported, but had already left for work. My father’s relationship to work is a bit different, but no less instructive. It’s safe to say he doesn’t share my mother’s sense of commitment. Where my mother has worked at the same job my entire life, I cannot begin to count the number of different places he’s worked. An auto mechanic by trade, he has also worked as a bartender, caretaker, bowling ally attendant, and a general jack-of-all-trades. Sometimes this has 3 been above board and on the books; sometimes it’s been under the table. Unlike my mother, who left one job in her life only when there was no longer a place for her, my father left every job he ever had. Compared with my mother, it was hard to understand my father’s uneasy relationship to work, especially when the family sometimes suffered because of it. But I started to understand this little more when, after graduating from high school, I worked with my father for a short time in a Chevrolet dealership in Watertown, NY. 1 I know of few rich auto technicians, and there is a reason for that. Especially in the dealership setting, the deck is stacked against them. They see little of the inordinate hourly rate of labor that we all complain about, and if the work is under warranty, they see less. They are not usually paid hourly “straight time” like most of the working world; instead they are paid by the job, with the amount of time paid for each job coming from a standard manual that rarely considers how work gets done in the real world, how foremen interrupt to appease another customer, how the underbelly of a car can become so solid with ice that it needs an hour to melt before the work can be done, and how threads can strip and bolts can break, adding valuable minutes onto a job that the manual says should be completed in two and a half hours.