I. Theoretical Framework
This article combines insights of critical political economy with the conceptual toolkit of Michel Foucault to analyze the connection between debt and discipline. While critical political economy helps uncover macro-level neoliberal economic transformations, Foucault's constructs focus on the attendant micro-level processes of market-mediated subject formation. Of particular utility are Foucault's constructs of governmentality, bio-power, and assemblage of self-caring subjects through “modes of subjectivation . . . in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations.”
Governmentality refers to “techniques and procedures for directing human behavior” and concerns the proper arrangement of the dynamic field of exchange of “individuals, goods, and wealth.” The construct trains on the practice of “economic government,” where the economy designates “a field of intervention for government.” While at a general level it refers to “any manner in which people think about, and put into practice, calculated plans for governing themselves and others,” more specifically it refers to the ensemble of technologies of governance that aim at “the care and maximization of the potential of the population.” Biopower emerges from the shift of focus in modern societies from “an exhaustive and unitary project of police . . . to the economy as a domain of naturalness.” Taken together, biopower and governmentality “refer to a manner of exercising power over a population that is directed towards maximizing its potential *7 and optimizing its capacities.” This frame where the economy displaces sovereignty as the primary field of governance is particularly useful to examine neoliberal political economy. It posits that homo economicus reappears under neoliberalism not only as a “partner of exchange” but as “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.” Subjected to the incentive structure of the market this entrepreneur is “eminently governable. This article deploys this Foucauldian conceptual toolkit to explore the connection between the aggregate demand problem of capitalism and the disciplinary impact of private debt upon working classes caught between shrinking wages and neoliberal demands of individual responsibility and self-sufficiency.
An obstacle to any fruitful use of Foucault to analyze the debt-discipline combine is his underestimation of the role of law and the state in the exercise of power. Foucault holds that “[d]isciplines will define not a code *8 of law, but a code of normalization.” He insists that modern techniques of normalization “develop from and below a system of law, in its margins and maybe even against it.” He sees liberal political economics driving “a formidable wedge” between the powers of the state and the sphere of daily human life. Contrary to Foucault's designation of a capitalist economy as a “neutral area,” my position is that capitalism is not a de-politicized and de-subjectified market governed solely by “economic laws” but a set of politically contested social relations under the hegemony of capital. Mainstream discourses conflate capitalism and markets and see markets as entities with force and agency of their own. I argue instead that capitalism is a relation of power where the state and the market remain intertwined. Rather than directly determining subjectivities, governmentality forms a “habitat of subjectification” within fields of operation demarcated by law. Foucault comes closer to this position when he acknowledges that operations of power constitute “a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target.” Indeed, he posits that these modalities of power are “deployed coterminously, and in complex contextual amalgams.”
In this schema, the state and the law do not evaporate, but are rather “welded to substantive, normalizing, disciplinary and bio-political objectives having to do with the re-shaping of individual and collective conduct in relation to particular substantive conceptions of desirable *9 ends.” Public policies promote an incentive structure conducive to “the shaping and reshaping of conduct” by configuring the range of choices within which individuals choose to conduct themselves. Neoliberalism, “a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists,” aims to produce subjects who, under conditions of apparent autonomy, make choices to perform in ways that are in tune with market imperatives. Neoliberal disciplinary regimes aim to constitute rationally calculating individuals who bear full responsibility for the consequences of their actions; subjects who voluntarily embrace particular choices and behaviors conducive to sustaining the socio-economic order. Promotion of self-disciplined entrepreneurial behavior becomes a primary task of governance. The confluence of debt and discipline demonstrates that neoliberalism has transformed the state rather than diminishing it: “the outcome [is] not implosion but reconstitution.” This article argues that in the neoliberal era the hidden hand of the market and the iron fist of the law work in concert to forge governmentalities that suture debt with discipline.
