Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 22:25:12 -0600
From: Wynship Hillier <whi-AT-wenet.net>
Subject: Re: Fouc Hayek & liberalism


Let's get something straight, here.  The notion of police and their purpose
first comes up in Foucault's oeuvre in _Madness and Civilization_.  In that
book, he makes it quite clear that the result of enlightenment rationality, if
not its explicit goal, was not to obliterate unreason, but to confine it within
reason, which is henceforth taken as ultimate and foundational reality.
Rationality is this very confinement itself.  The police are implicated in this
process by locking up all vagrants, all those who refuse to work, all those who
refuse to reason.  The police are involved in confinement, not obliteration.
Moreover, through the police, unreason is confined not only on a metaphysical
register, but also on a social register.

Microeconomic theory, and its evil twin behaviorism, can be pretty easily seen
as an extension of the same process, now on an epistemological level.  Unreason
is confined within the "black box" in the bahaviorist world.  Unreason is
confined within "preferences" and "the utility function" in the microeconomic
frame-work.  Unreason is confined to "value nodes" and, sometimes, nodes of
"subjective probability" in the decision tree.  What these mind-toys succeed at
is reducing unreason to an area where it can be controlled, and that is their
major accomplishment.

This change is a cognate to the change in the status of dreams which Foucault
observes in the middle ages.  They begin as portents, divine revelations,
messages from the outside, the points at which man becomes conscious of a
greater reality than he normally sees.  They end as illusions, phantasms,
errancy, cutting man off from a greater reality which consists, fundamentally,
in reason. Madness, as a form of unreason, begins as greater contact with the
same ulitmate reality revealed in dreams (e.g. the "divine fool") and ends as
the illicit obtrusions of the isolated, confined world of dreams and
phantasmagoria into the world proper, into a rational reality where they do not
belong.

To say that microeconomics liberates the subject because it allows his unreason
to move around in its little confined space of "utility" or "preferences", and
to be 'discovered' there, is like saying that the insane were liberated because
they were put in asylums rather than being obliterated outright.

But I cannot comment on Hayek.  I have not read him.

Wynship Hillier, Incorporated
By Wynship Hillier, President

Daniel F. Vukovich wrote:

> >I am interested in the way in which liberal discourse once implemented
> >becomes illiberal and seems almost despite itself to work back/forward
> >towards the all-embracing control envisioned in 'police' as described by
> >Foucault,   >But liberalism, at any rate as understood by Hayek, and for
> certain purposes Menger, depends upon the unknowable , the completely
> >free-choosing subject. This subject cannot be so planned for. that is
> >why Hayek sees the market as indispensable to freedom - it is a
> >discovery procedure for uncovering the unpredictable preferences of the
> >subject. Yet in a form of liberalism dependent upon 'homo economicus'
> >that is, the completely predictable form of the subject, we can return
> >to the manipulation of the polity through the desires and appropriate
> >incentives which economic 'science' allows us to define and 'know'.
> >Hence, I think, we have a return to 'police'.
>
> Has anyone cites for the Fouc/Hayek connection...either by the man himself,
> or any one else anywhere?  I know this request was floated a while ago, but
> am hoping something turned up or was sent off-list.  I do think Nesta is
> dead-on above about Hayek and liberalism becoming-police, and I'd hope F
> was on the same track himself, and not something dubious in re "chaos" and
> the proper care of the self.  Not that Hayek shouldnt be read of course,
> perhaps even as something more than a symptom; but his grounding of the
> "Good Society" in a spontaneous "catallaxy" somehow brought forth into the
> world by *the* Market is not only  politically egregious, but simply absurd
> at some level (as if this harmonious Order has its Base in information
> about prices?!).
>
> Best,
>
> Daniel
>
> Daniel Vukovich
> English; The Unit for Criticism
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign