Bidet’s “Foucault avec Marx”

 Many months ago, my colleague William Robert brought me back a book from his sabbatical in Paris: Jacques Bidet, Foucault avec Marx. Bidet is an emeritus philosophy professor at Paris-X and honorary director of the socialist journal, Actuel Marx. I hadn’t heard of him before William brought me the book, but apparently, Bidet is an important and persistent voice in the growing French socialist philosophical subfield that studies the co-thinking and co-implications of the works of Foucault and Marx.

I enjoyed the book, despite my sense that Bidet flattens the name (or what Foucault calls the author-function of), Marx, to refer simply to a specific critique of market economy. I suppose if we suspend critical disbelief and assume with Foucault’s teacher, Althusser, that for Marx it really is the economy in the last instance, then the argument is incontrovertible; but even without this critical suspension, I find Bidet’s argument worth pondering.

The center of his argument is a “metastructural” approach that posits a dialectic between the structural (market) pouvoir-propriété of the capitalist, which Marx emphasizes, and the nominalist (organizational) pouvoir-savoir of labor, which Foucault emphasizes. It would have been intellectually satisfying if Bidet had noted how this same dialectic operates at the level of the authors’ names—that is, how the use of ‘Marx’ and ‘Foucault’ are commoditized objects that sell a certain scholarly privilege by signaling the requisite structure of scholarly production, a structure that stands in dialectical tension with the use of ‘Marx’ and ‘Foucault’ as particular organizational practices that forward thought about certain and various socio-political conundrums. But even as it stands, and even if we disagree with a rather econo-centric Marx, Bidet’s arguments are smart and useful.

I found it helpful to translate the dialectic between pouvoir-propriété and pouvoir-savoir into that between the capacity to hoard or circulate matter (things, machines, money, real estate), and the capacity to withhold or enact various skills, (welder, seamstress, typist), practices (careful listener, never misses work, keeps a neat workspace, good at prioritizing tasks), and attitudes (obedient, respectful, flexible, affable). The first pulse of this dialectic is about capital, its ability to devour and to transform, and its vampiric tendency to suck life from labor in order to reproduce itself to the (material) profit of the capitalist-owners. The second pulse of this dialectic is about competencies, the necessary disciplining of bodies and time (of bodies in time) in order to reproduce the workforce for each day.

One of the most useful parts of Bidet’s argument, to me, is the way this metastructural dialectic between property and knowledge, or valued matter and affective practices transmutes discussion of class relations (relations, in French, which signify micrological, interpersonal relations) to class as a particular set of relations meshed or networked within capitalist society (rapports, in French, which signify macrological and structural relations). I appreciate this restatement of class struggle, because it reminds me that the problem is not just the manager who tells me, “smile and I’ll let you work here another week,” but also the fact that the manager’s manager and the regional cadre of managers, are all stressing to get their employees—under duress of losing their jobs—to smile more, and more genuinely. Very few are exempted from the material-practical dialectic of disciplined norms of life until one peeks at the very tippy top of society. Not the dingy factory room beneath the free space of civil society where workers bid their labor to employers as free and equal humans, and not even Mr. Moneybags at home with his wife and children, recharging for another anxious day of making money, but rather the low-oxygen eyrie of the likes of Donald Trump or a philanthropic celebrity, where cruelty or compassion seems squirted or oozed out at random and where the capacity to feel (much less what is felt) seems raw or alien, that is, unaffected by the matrix of valued matter and affective practices that catch up and bind down the rest of us.

Bidet’s more recent book is on neoliberalism. I am keen to read it.

 

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White Supremacy, Christian Gifts and Misogyny in The Deerslayer

 [Illustration of Judith and Deerslayer by N.C. Wyeth]

Though James Fenimore Cooper’s 1841 novel, Deerslayer, is the last published novel about Nathaniel (Natty) Bumpo, it functions as a sort of prequel to the other four books in the series, the most famous of which is Last of the Mohicans. Set in the mid-1700s, Deerslayer takes readers through the protagonist’s first “warpath” with his Mohican friend, Chingachgook. As the Deerslayer turns from providing food to protecting territory, he comes to kill his first man and this dying Iroquois renames the youth Hawkeye in recognition of the sharp eye that killed him.

It is Indian nature, Deerslayer relates, to give names according to one’s battle skills. A reader might then expect that a white man who befriends a Mohican and takes up this Indian naming practice (preferring Deerslayer to Natty Bumpo) would model tolerance and co-mingling with the peoples who occupied this land before the English and the French. No, no. The cross-racial friendship serves principally as a foil for underscoring the radically different “gifts” and “natures” of the White and Red races.

Consider this early lecture Deerslayer gives to his beautiful but uncultured friend, Hurry Harry March:

“God made us all, white, black, and red; and, no doubt, had his own wise intentions in coloring us differently. Still, he made us, in the main, much the same in feelin’s; though I’ll not deny that he gave each race its gifts. A white man’s gifts are Christianized, while a red-skin’s are more for the wilderness. Thus, it would be a great offence for a white man to scalp the dead; whereas it’s a signal vartue in an Indian. Then ag’in, a white man cannot amboosh women and children in war, while a red-skin may. ‘Tis cruel work, I’ll allow; but for them, it’s lawful work; while for us, it would be grievous work.”

Deerslayer’s constant comments along these lines and indeed his rather perpetual moralizing were difficult for me to stomach in the current U.S. context of rising hate crimes and an unmasked, violent white supremacy that is framed as Christian and given official sanction from the President’s office. Annoyingly, everything in this novel is churned through racial difference. True, the perspectives are phrased in balanced sentences, as if the races are ‘separate but equal’, but really the words provide a clear catechism of reasons why white Christian settlers are more virtuous in gifts and nature and (sotto voce) why the WhiteMen merit this land and its resources more than do the RedMen. Most of the novel was a slog for me. I found myself sarcastically sassing the audiobook, and I felt utter disdain for Deerslayer’s priggish decision to turn himself back over to the Iroquois to be tortured to death.

Then, out of the blue, I found myself caught up in the action of the story. I tried to guess how Deerslayer and his white and red friends would work to save the virtuous young warrior from his Indian enemies. Finally, good will was built up toward Fenimore Cooper and I began to realize why his name survives the erosions of time.

And then the end.

Say what you will about the novel’s celebration of white supremacy and ugly efforts to keep American Indians in their marginalized place, white women still come off the worse. Poor Judith Hutter. No torturous death by heathen Iroquois (to speak the language of the novel) could be worse than the fate handed Judith by WhiteMen when Deerslayer refuses to marry her. God forbid the gifts and nature of Whites be compromised by the sexual improprieties of a lovely young woman who, having no guide into society’s sexual mores, followed instinct and WhiteMen’s proddings, and fell. How far she fell is unclear, but her fate is not. Abandoned by our hero, she hands herself over to sexual slavery in the house of an officer at the garrison. These officers are not the marrying kind, he tells a fellow soldier, thus informing readers that Judith will never have the social rank and security that comes from marriage and a family (not that those thin reeds relieve all anxiety). The novel stresses that her fate is just punishment for the crimes of her family:

“Time and circumstances have drawn an impenetrable mystery around all else connected with the Hutters. They lived, erred, died, and are forgotten. None connected have felt sufficient interest in the disgraced and disgracing to withdraw the veil, and a century is about to erase even the recollection of their names. The history of crime is ever revolting, and it is fortunate that few love to dwell on its incidents. The sins of the family have long since been arraigned at the judgment seat of God, or are registered for the terrible settlement of the last great day.”

White supremacy and White genocide of American Indian are propped up, also, by sexual violence against (white) women.