“The CIA reads Foucault” - Foucault’s second adventure

 July 11, 2022

So now that Foucault is established in his pantomime character, as someone who "goes out" and comes back in and does a fairly good job at it, he can't avoid it becoming a duty, because if it does not become a prescribed duty, the very monastic institution would break down.

What will be the reason good enough at this point to not be and excuse? It will have to be to secure supplies - something basic, like food. Grain, for instance. There is a lot of subtext to this interim in a religious context that Foucault doesn't trouble with.

What is explicitly troubled with, is in the informing of this character about what his task is, exactly.

It is again a bit tongue-in-cheek: to gain his "release" this character says that "of course" the real cause of the scarcity of grain is the gluttony of the monks, who should have eaten less even if supplies are low. And of course, the sin and selfishness of the peasants contributed to the scarcity of grain "inside", as they could have given more to the Church. And so on.

But what emerges is the more nuanced view of this problem of grain scarcity. The microcosm of the society at large and the microcosm of the cloister begin to overlap. And now you see how quickly Foucault's star is on the rise. Foucault explains what his character would have been looking into on this trip "outside." He points to two competing systems of regulations on the price of grain. The first, is mercantilism, which is predicated on keeping the price of grain as low as possible, and therefore the townspeople are easily fed, and not restless, and angry. The second is physiocracy, the reform of mercantilism, which is needed because mercantilism overall leads to scarcity: because if the peasants don't get paid, they sow less grain. Physiocracy, however, while it raises the price of their free circulation of grains, and also generally allowed the export of grains but taxed all grain imports. This explanation shows that the farm economy is a command economy, even a state-run enterprise, at any large scale. Mercantilism subdued demand, but didn't work for the suppliers. Physiocracy satisfied the suppliers but brought the whole system under the control of the State, and also completed economics: but supply and demand were fully regulated, by politics. Both of these theoretical explanation were developed in the Enlightenment period - which actually supports the general nihilist claim that they can explain most of what is missing in modern secular discourse by stealing back from the medieval monastic system, the information that was hoarded by it after the collapse of Antiquity.

Foucault's character must be on the side of physiocracy and the high price of grain from the free circulation of grain. But not only that his presence out there is going to represent to the peasants and townsfolk looking on as an endorsement of the free circulation of grain, but for a tricky reason that could have occasioned polemics in favor of the free circulation of grain, and high grain prices, on the part of the monks.

It's a bit tricky. With high prices, and export allowed, there is an artificial scarcity created in certain areas: low supply because grain is being exported but also low demand because export is keeping people well-off. Still, at the same time as this is happening, there are people holding out on exporting in the hope of selling to those places where supply is low. The holdouts are gambling that demand will rise there, which is no guarantee because the exports are keeping them well-off, and there are other things to eat than staple crops. And the monastery, let's say, can swoop in and buy out that grain when that bet fails to pay off, at low prices.

Some counter that grain can be stored by regulation, and it can, but at the same time in our hypothetical here. Foucault points out that hoarding grain stores is exactly what the monastery is trying to do...

Here we go again betting on the success of the harvest... a questionable ethics choice. But the monastery system rationalizes it in terms of - they are betting on good harvests, abundance and based on a system that prioritized the well-being of those farmers working the fields, preferred over low grains prices.

There are additional buttresses to this calculation from moral, political and social reasons they include the suggestion that acquiring grain this way also is an analysis of this political economy and to determine whether there is a true surplus of "seed being saved" which is argued to be a necessity and a moral good - and how much? And so on. In a way, this reasoning is characteristic of legal reasoning, says Foucault.

Furthermore, economics is shown to have structurally neglected element of spatial reasoning: proximity and levels of connection. And this discredits the sopistication of modern economics that is bounded and limited by frame of reference of "macro" vs. "micro" or state vs. private enterprise.

So now that Foucault's character has been this throughly prepared, he goes out and everything goes according to plan, he gets the grain, and what happens when he returns is kind of like this - where before his report was a rhapsody of what "outside" was like, now he has come to the "conclusion" that the world "outside" is really defined by the technologies and techniques of power.

While some of his images of his first "outside" experience faded after being normalized into monastic life, his idea about the technology and techniques of power remains.