Foucault & the Politics of Hearing (Interventions) by Lauri Siisiäinen

Author:Lauri Siisiäinen [Siisiäinen, Lauri]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781136266393
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

The liberal governmentality, homo œconomicus,

and the threat of noise

The problem and the dangerousness of noise, which is supposedly generated in the spreading and merging of sounds, and in the open, indiscriminate exposure of the ear, is not defined only inside the framework of raison d'État. Following Foucault consistently, when considering the genealogy of governmentality, the next question is: What happens to the problem of noise, to the definition and treatment of the dangerous potentiality of sound, when turning from the reason of state to the framework of liberalism?

The aim is to ask whether and how certain themes, coming to the fore in Foucault's analysis of the liberal and neoliberal governmentality, relate to the issue of perception, and above all, to sound and auditory perception. Are there certain points in Foucault's thinking, through the elaboration of which we can gain insights into the issue of the liberalist politics of the sensorium? This refers to the manner in which the subject of liberalism, the free individual agent, is constituted as a subject of perception of a certain kind. The emphasis is on the fate of auditory perception and experience, or the fate of the “ear” in the production of the liberal subject, as Foucault discusses it in both the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in the twentieth century's German ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism.

One of the central points in Foucault's analysis is the conception, homo œconomicus, i.e. the economic man, the economic subject, the economic agent, and its centrality for the liberalist form of governance. The development of the concept of homo œconomicus proceeds from the utility-maximizing subject and the subject of exchange of the classical liberalism, to the calculating entrepreneur—subject, the entrepreneur of oneself and of one's proper capacities (of “human capital”) in post-World War II neoliberalism:

homo œconomicus as partner of the exchange, theory of utility beginning from a problematics of the needs: that is what characterizes the classic conception of the homo œconomicus [ … ] In neoliberalism [ … ] homo œconomicus [ … ] is an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur of oneself [ … ] being in oneself one's proper capital, being for oneself one's proper producer, being for oneself the source of [one's] incomes [ … ] The consumer, inasmuch as she consumes, is a producer. What does she produce? Well, she produces very simply her own satisfaction.

(Foucault 2004b: 232)

What remains central, though, through all the historical changes in the concept, is the determination of the subject in terms of the formal rationality of means-ends calculation, offering the strategic principle of choices and conduct. In American neoliberalism, homo œconomicus becomes a “grid” that is extended to domains that are not immediately and directly economic, while economic analysis begins to cover all finalized conduct, all behavior that implies a strategic choice of means, ways and instruments. All rational action, which consists in using formal reasoning, and in which the agent performs an optimal allocation of rare resources between alternative ends, is economic (ibid.: 272).

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