The CIA reads Foucault

 July 7, 2022

It's amusing to imagine some bumbling CIA agents sitting in a Parisian cafe reading Foucault. A paper in The Philosophical Salon from 28 Feb, 2017 (by Gabriel Rockhill) points out that the mid-1980's CIA was reading and studying Michel Foucault and company. What does Foucault, the vaunted leftist, nihilist, cultural critic, etc. have to do with US strategic interests?

The answer is simple, although obscure. Foucault's object of study coincided with the Enlightenment theory of physiocracy. This was economics before industrial capitalism became the restrictive framework within which any acceptable study of economics had to be confined. Physiocracy simply means the economic study, not of the market, but the farm.

Studying the farm economically is both far more interesting and can be done with more common sense - there is not need to substitute in over-complicated and largely farcical charts and graphs for observation and intuition by a fairly educated man.

The one anecdote about Foucault's work process that I've seen or heard is the one about how he would spend long hours in his office arguing with some others about medieval agricultural tables. Let's leave aside but not totally dismiss for now the joke that the CIA is nicknamed The Farm. The CIA's interest in physiocratic analysis is evident from other FOIA'ed documents about climate change, for instance, that point out that climate change will inaugurate a new era of global food politics. Text of Foucault's lecture for instance, shows that he had a sustaining interest in the politics of grain and grain prices, and with reference to that base, he could reach great heights of analysis. Foucault's marginalization was largely voluntary, because physiocracy is, for various reasons of superstition, capitalist repression, and difficulty, mentioned only delicately in common parlance. However, the Farm is the absolute essential of the kind of State we live in, and Foucault was able to break through into a position that was not-entirely-marginal. And he certainly was influential.

As a nihilist, Foucault's expose of the monastic system had to do with the ways that the medieval church would supply itself and its monasteries, tithing the peasants and exploiting the farms and so on - stuff that is better off that we know about than be ignorant of. One of those things that for the liberty of farmers and the benefit of society should be known about, but if you're going to read it as an endorsement of the facts, you're better off not reading it.

But Foucault unusually hit on the aspect of the monastic system that is not totally unlike the State system. Everyone eats. And we have to acknowledge that there is an episcopacy latched onto the bad actors in the State system that may want to reduce the secular farm system under the same oppression that existed under the monastic system. In that context, it is important to fight the cultural amnesia about systems of oppression that we liberty-loving men have already thrown for, and to thereby prevent the backsliding into familiar oppression.

A note about that Foucault-Chomsky debate.

The debate that more immediately comes to mind if you have some familiarity with public policy, is that Chomsky-Foucault meeting. However, we should be clear, that that debate was among two people fundamentally concerned with two different things. The shared concern was about the isolation of common folk from any deliberation about their well-being, but in fundamentally different contexts. Foucault prodded Chomsky to clarify that Chomsky held idealism about himself and human agency and didn't misplace that idealism onto the State or the system critiquing the State. Chomsky stated that he did, but also asked Foucault in turn if Foucault really though modern intellectuals were so regressive, and even capable of being so regressive? And so on. The debate was a good excuse for Foucault to meet Chomsky and be assured that modern intellectualism wasn't what Foucault feared it might be. and it was good for Chomsky to see Foucault and get Foucault's caution, even if Chomsky to see Foucault and get Foucault's caution, even if Chomsky though it was a bit of a cryptic waste of time. Not entirely two ships passing in the night but at the very least it is the responsibility of intellectuals to accept questions intending to assure that thos intellectuals are not serving power, not making life worse for the people, and so on.