Geoff Shullenberger: Foucault in America
There’s war on, which has two different, very different phases, right? Because Obama-era governance is still war on terror governance, although it often isn’t remembered as such. And then you had the war on disinformation era, which is basically what started in 2016. That kind of blends into, but is somewhat distinct from the war on COVID era. Now we’ve reverted to a war on terror moment, which has proceeded in a few different phases.
There are certain themes from the Bush era that include the unitary executive. I suppose what’s interesting and ironic is that the Bush people had a much more competent operation in terms of people who were aligned. Trump 2.0 is more competent than Trump 1.0 in terms of having more people within his apparatus who are actually aligned.
Hi, hi, welcome, welcome. This is the From the New World podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Jeff Schellenberger, the managing editor of Compact magazine. We discuss the legacy of Michel Foucault, an immense legacy on both the left and the right, the COVID regime, and what it tells us about the future of state power, and the realignment of conspiracy theories and paranoia in American politics. If that sounds interesting to you, the best way to help us out is to let a friend know, either in person or online. That way, you’re not only helping us, but you’re helping a friend find something interesting and informative. Without further ado, here’s Jeff Schellenberger.
I’ve heard you talk about this elsewhere. Give me a genealogy of conspiracy theories, of the idea of a conspiracy theory. That’s a good question. So, the idea of a conspiracy theory, I think I’ve said that the concept of a conspiracy theory is itself the result of a conspiracy. I believe you can trace the origin of the notion of conspiracy theory to some CIA and other government agencies deciding that it was a good idea to cede the notion that certain people who wanted to tell certain types of stories were conspiracy theorists.
It’s too bad. I don’t have the receipts in front of me, but I think this is relatively well established that you can find these memos where they were like… This is particularly notable today because we’ve just had this dump of JFK documents, declassifications, which I haven’t had a chance to look that deeply into. In any case, around the time that… I think the JFK assassination is clearly a watershed moment for conspiracy theory as we currently understand it, which is to say it generates both the sort of phenomenology and kind of mood around conspiracy theory that we now take for granted.
It also generates the conceptualization of conspiracy theory that we now all unconsciously accept, which is that there are certain types of events for which if you try to connect the dots between different behind-the-scenes actors and moving forces that are not fully on view from the surface-level narrative, then you are engaged in conspiracy theory. This means that you’re imputing agency too complex of a sort of machinery is one way of thinking about it, or that you’re claiming that for any given event, there has to be some deeper kind of mover behind it.
Again, I believe there’s documentation that people in the government around this time, when the first questions about the Warren Commission report, Lee Harvey Oswald, lone shooter account were starting to emerge and be discussed, there was this idea that you deal with this by saying people were conspiracy theorists. You’re saying these people are conspiracy theorists and using this term conspiracy theories. I may be getting this in part from this very good book called Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance DeHaven-Smith that I’m pretty sure outlines that whole history and provides the receipts.
The other thing that it does, which other people have done, my friend Sam Biagetti has a podcast called Historiansplaining where one of the things he does is myth of the month, and he did an episode about conspiracy theory, which lays out some of this as well. Now, the interesting thing about conspiracy theory is that if you go back to ancient and early modern political writings, a really important category was conspiracy.
You can think here of the Catalonian conspiracy in ancient Rome, the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. If you go to the writings of Machiavelli, there’s a very clear sense that one of the risks you face as a political figure is that there will be a conspiracy against you. In other words, your enemies will conspire, will come together behind the scenes and plot your downfall. A large part of how politics operates is through conspiracies. This is taken for granted.
It makes a big appearance in a lot of important political writings because it was clearly true that conspiracies were a key element of particularly court politics and the way politics was done in these periods. What’s interesting about conspiracy theory, and maybe I’m not sure if I’ve provided a genealogy quite as you would like, is that I suppose part of why it becomes an issue more broadly than some feds planting it is that it does go against how we want to imagine politics operates in a democratic age.
We want to believe that politics happens out in the open. When some political event occurs, it’s because our public representatives have come together in public in response to our demands or our votes or whatever, and have come together to write a bill and then pass it through the relevant legislatures and gotten it signed. We want to believe that politics does not operate through conspiracies.
Part of the point of why the government would be interested in promoting the idea of conspiracy theory as a way of dismissing this type of thinking is that it reinforces a sort of idealized notion of how politics should function. If we start asking, I would point people here to a piece in Compact from a few weeks ago called the left-wing origins of deep state theory, and it’s very relevant to all of this. What’s the point of the deep state? The point of the deep state is it is a way of thinking about the state that is conspiratorial in the sense that it assumes that much of what is happening in politics is not fully transparent.
The same person who introduced this term deep state to English language discourse also introduced this concept of deep politics, which points to the same idea that much of what we see on the surface of politics is just the tip of the iceberg and that beneath that there are all of these political networks that are doing very important and influential things largely out of public view. This is a very challenging problem for a democracy once you realize this is the case.
We can connect what JFK himself, and to the extent that I have seen these new documents, they touch on this memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was one of his most famous advisors. Schlesinger was warning him about the extent of the CIA’s operations and the fact that they’ve become a kind of alternative center of power set sometimes against the presidency and that they’re no longer under the control of the executive branch.
Now Trump in office today, part of the reason he’s declassifying these JFK files is he’s presenting himself as in the process of dismantling these alternative centers of power that exist and operate out of the public eye and supposedly making the government more transparent in the process, in part by making the executive more unitary.
There’s this through line of concern about this. It is obviously real, as these executive agencies grow they create this whole new arena of politics that happens outside of the view of the public and doesn’t happen in the way we’re taught in civics 101. This becomes a problem, and then there are versions of that I’d argue are pretty in some ways benign or insignificant, and then there are versions of it that aren’t.
It’s interesting how this is interpreted in the modern day. It’s like an Achilles and the Tortoise problem, where at some point Achilles passes the Tortoise, but you don’t know where. It feels like there’s some point where it’s obvious that right after the JFK assassination JFK was obviously a Democrat, and a lot of his supporters who were suspicious about the assassination themselves were Democrats. At some point after, I think clearly by COVID but some point before that, it becomes clearly a kind of Republican style.
The idea of kind of conspiracy theorizing becomes more associated with Republicans and less associated with Democrats. There’s some transition there, but I can’t tell where. Can you put a better pinpoint on it at all? That’s a good question. Obviously, if you go back to the middle of the 20th century, there is a strong strain of right-wing conspiratorial thinking which is mostly about the infiltration of communists in the U.S. government.
As with many of these things, there was a truth, there was a basis and truth to all of this. At least one of the recent claims is that Ethel Rosenberg was actually innocent of the charges of espionage, but her husband, I don’t think anybody denies was guilty of being a spy for the Soviet Union. There were many others. I think most people accept now that Alger Hiss was also a spy. I don’t think many people deny that. There was this conspiratorialism which connected to the deep state or in other words, the sprawling administrative agencies that were created in prior decades.
These did have a lot of Democrats and progressives who had communist sympathies to various degrees but also lived through a period when we were allies with the Soviet Union. There was a murkiness there because there was a point when it was acceptable to be friendly with the communists and then it became unacceptable. The point is, there was that whole strain which is where you then get Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which continues to be a very influential account of this kind of stuff.
He doesn’t use the term conspiracy theory; he uses the term paranoid style. It’s written in this somewhat psychological or psychoanalytic framework. For Hofstadter, it really clearly is that there’s a paranoid style, and he associates it with essentially the right and particularly with certain sectors of the right. I’d say small town petite bourgeoisie sort of people who have a fixed understanding of how America should be and are very suspicious of bigness and complexity and the sort of large government apparatus that developed in the early to mid-20th century. This becomes a significant strain.
Right-wing conspiratorialism is always there, but then it really does. I think there is a strong strain of left conspiracy theory, such as it is, that I think you’re probably right arises out. This is where I point people to Jesse Walker’s book The United States of Paranoia, which is another very good book on the subject. One thing that’s also interesting is that when you get into the people who were trying to counter McCarthyism and counter the John Birch Society, they themselves become paranoid and conspiratorial in their thinking.
Jesse shows this: that there’s this weird mirroring between the two sides. When people start thinking about other people being paranoid, they often themselves become paranoid and they imagine this whole vast conspiracy. To use Hillary Clinton’s term, that is itself defined as conspiratorial or paranoiac, but that is seen as infiltrating government at all these levels. There’s this weird kind of mirroring. Then there’s also just left-wing conspiratorialism, which is also defined by hostility to bigness and complexity.
This is why in the 60s you have a kind of hostility from the vanguard of the new left against the mid-century military-industrial complex, but also against big business and big labor and the federal government. There’s hostility and paranoia, in some cases probably justified. I think the author who captures the spirit most profoundly is probably Thomas Pynchon, whose work reflects back on the Southern California 60s counterculture moment.
A lot of his work captures the mood of suspicion that is important to understanding the counterculture and the new left, which is very much, in a way, a twin of the Bircher conspiratorialism. Even though they seem on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they’re both bewildered and disoriented by just the vast scale of the machinery of the state and its intertwinedness with private enterprise. They’re both longing for something smaller and simpler and perhaps closer to some sort of Jeffersonian ideal of America.
There’s a genuine virtue in many of these criticisms, both in that they’re actual conspiracies to assassinate, church committee kind of things, and there are critiques of these institutions at a broader philosophical level that I also think are very important. We’ll talk about Foucault later. How exactly do these two branches of critique intersect? People often ask the question: are the kinds of people talking the most about the deep state today reading Foucault?
I wonder the same thing. I don’t know what the answer to this is. Are the JFK theorists, are the church and Pike committee people, reading critics? I’m trying to remember my dates here; I’m not sure if that was before or after Foucault. Are they reading people who might be critical of bigness and critical of these kinds of control mechanisms? What’s the relationship there? Foucault, I would say, expresses a version of this new left spirit which, as I was suggesting, is coming from France.
You could argue that the tendency is even more pronounced because it’s such a kind of status society and a highly centralized society in which there isn’t really that much room on the political spectrum for what you might think of as a sort of libertarian sensibility. Essentially, the most dominant kind of conservative faction is the Gaullists, who are very much, again, status. They believe in a highly centralized version of France. On the other hand, you have on the far left the communist party, which is quite powerful and significant in France for some time but is very bureaucratic, centralized, and connected to the Soviet Union.
It’s connected to this form of communism that’s seen, and maybe especially by many on the left, as having descended into this sort of bureaucratic tyranny. I think Foucault is quite extreme on some of these issues in part because there’s very little space for someone of his libertarian tendencies on the political spectrum. I think it’s less that he is read by these people necessarily than that he is himself a kind of reaction, in the same way that many of the other things I’ve been describing are reactions to the massive growth of the state and growing power and systematic deployment of the state into more and more areas of people’s lives over the course of the 20th.
That’s a really interesting characterization to characterize Foucault as libertarian—something that I agree with, by the way. Maybe not all of my readers, who are not as familiar with Foucault, might be quite surprised by that. Explain why you say that and maybe explain his critique of power-knowledge along the way. Sure. The simplest way to argue that Foucault had quite strong libertarian tendencies is that the most influential school of libertarian economics came out of the University of Chicago. It came to be known as neoliberal or the Chicago school.
Foucault, in his late 70s lectures, specifically in his lecture on the birth of biopolitics, gives quite a friendly and approving reading of these economists. I won’t go into that much because I think it takes us down another path, but he had libertarian sympathies. This is partly in the very literal way that he could read these very big deal libertarian economists like Gary Becker. I can’t remember if he actually commented directly on Friedman, but certainly people in Milton Friedman’s orbit and have a quite positive view of their project.
A more interesting case that I brought up in a piece I wrote towards the end of last year, around the time of the Jordan Neely verdict in New York City, was called the long shadow of the anti-psychiatry movement. The anti-psychiatry movement was something Foucault was involved in. It was essentially a movement to end the forced internment or incarceration of people with severe mental illness. Its legacy is all around us in major cities because it led to laws that first of all dismantled state-run asylums.
Second of all, it led to interpretations of the law that made it much harder to forcibly intern people who were not committing crimes or presenting an absolutely immediate threat to somebody. Foucault was involved in this; it has his fingerprints on it. There were other kind of weird people in this coalition. Thomas Szasz, the leading figure in the U.S., oddly, the Church of Scientology was also very embraced by libertarians as well. Thomas Szasz was definitely embraced by libertarians.
Weirdly, the Church of Scientology was also involved, which is a whole other story. The self-esteem movement ran rampant in California; it was crazy. The interesting thing about this is that I don’t like to just put my own position on it. This is a way in what Foucault drills down to is a fundamental question, which is at what point can the state decide that you can simply be interned against your will? For him, this is a kind of fundamental—or maybe the most fundamental—political question.
I think his instincts are quite libertarian in a certain sense on that question because if you look at just the hostility to the idea that the state should have some final power to decide the extent of the individual’s rights and to also suspend, to define situations in which the state can simply suspend rights that would ordinarily be accorded to individuals. A further point would be that in the case we’re talking about, this would have to be on the basis of expert opinion, which is part of why this is a modern question.
It’s connected to the rise of the broader administrative state. It’s okay if this decision is being made; it’s because the representative of the state, whether the police or the judicial system, is deferring to the opinions of an expert, i.e., a psychiatrist. This goes to your question about power-knowledge, that the growth of a particular kind of modern area of knowledge, which is psychiatric knowledge, is also closely connected to the state’s assertion of control over particular decks. These things don’t like—the growth of psychiatry doesn’t really happen without this being the case.
Even if that becomes disconnected from questions about forcible internment or incarceration, perhaps because we have medications that mean people can be medicated rather than forced into an asylum, nonetheless, there is a question of whether they can be forcibly medicated. Do they have the right to choose whether to take their meds or not? To summarize your excellent podcast on Foucault, the podcast is called Blame Theory. The episode is Blame Foucault, part one.
There’s this very important distinction he draws between a kind of—I don’t think he would use the words classical—right? This is how I was thinking about it. That you would draw between a classical right of like basically this is pure power. This is kind of an expression of pure power. You can maybe say there’s an intermediate stage, which is the Hobbesian stage, which is a kind of appeal to survival or an appeal to still pure power, but with a specific end. There’s some theorizing around it, which is that this person is a safety threat or this person is a threat to the regime, and so this person must be incarcerated.
It then becomes a kind of managerial object, right? The person who’s best equipped to deal with this person is going to be the expert, is going to be the psychologist, is going to be someone who has the power of legitimation. I think that process is very important to underline and go deeper on.
As I said in the article about the long shadow of anti-psychiatry, you can connect this to the pandemic in the sense that it’s really the same operation on some level. It’s the state deferring to expert opinion in order to make a determination about whether people’s normal civil liberties can be suspended in the name of some sort of emergency. This is central to Foucault’s work on the history of public health because he sees it as this kind of realm of exception that’s built into modern democracies from the beginning.
After the French Revolution, you can see how the logic of public health creates the opportunity for the suspension of normal civil liberties basically on the basis of the need for public health. This is why this ends up informing Giorgio Agamben’s work as well. There’s this idea that if you have this certain group of experts who are empowered to determine the scope of social life in some broad sense, and they are given the power to make decisions, this goes back to this kind of Schmittian point about sovereignty, being he who decides on the state of exception.
What does it mean if the state of exception is decided on by public health experts? Obviously, we’ve seen a version of that in our own recent lifetimes, but for Foucault, this ambiguity goes back to the origins of the way the state configures itself in relation to these kinds of expert bodies that are supposed to advise it. and these are just fundamental questions. What’s really interesting is that I think one of the things that’s happening in parallel to Gombin’s work, which I think is fantastic and worth reading for everyone, and that we’ll surely talk more about later in the episode. But I think something that happened parallel to Foucault and something that happened parallel to Gombin is that people sensed the essence or sensed the core dynamic there but without the philosophy.
Right. People felt a sense of clear injustice of being locked in their homes. This was something that was very felt; it felt arbitrary. That kind of skepticism of expertise arose, I think, certainly from plenty of people who are not reading Agamben or Foucault or any philosophy at all. At the same time, there was a struggle to rationalize how it happened. Right? To go back to our discussion about conspiracy theories: was it purely top-down? Was it a kind of pure power politics? Was it bureaucratic agencies? Was it something that was somewhat of a mass delusion, where the populace was actually egging the state on? There were a lot of different explanations, and I think people are still very unclear about exactly how that process spread.
But I think one way—one good way—to start talking about this is to go deeper into Foucault’s process of power knowledge and how that kind of legitimation, how those categories are drawn, and how that creates power. Like, how exactly do those things relate? Right? Like, how exactly do you get from the point of people declaring political categories or declaring the psychiatric categories, biopolitical categories? How exactly does that go from a system of kind of formal power to that system of informal or like managerial power? How does that happen?
It’s first worth noting, since you bring up conspiracy theory, Foucault’s—I think you can find a conspiratorial mood or effect around his work in that it’s informed by a kind of suspicion of power, right? And obviously, he’s famous for popularizing the image of the panopticon, ideas about surveillance, about just the notion of being constantly observed. But he doesn’t attribute agency or primary agency to any sort of small conspiracy of actors. And this is, in fact, something that he’s critiqued on other grounds, which is that he often seems to attribute agency to power itself, that people who wield power are, in a sense, more being wielded by or wield power knowledge are really being wielded by it.
Like, Anthony Fauci isn’t really an agent in this vision. He’s a representative figure, but really what makes him significant is his position in a larger kind of network or complex that he doesn’t really control, but rather is, in some sense, controlled by. It doesn’t—and again, it’s often critiqued on these grounds for seeming to locate agency outside of individual human beings. But going to your question, there is this idea that power shifts in the way that it operates in the modern era from something that’s more fully centralized, more fully embodied.
The famous example from the same text as the panopticon is the description of the execution of the regicide in the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish, where you see power being—power is asserting itself in this execution in a sort of public and central and spectacular way. Right? So the way the power is operating is by putting itself on display in this incredibly violent way, forcing people to pay attention to it. Right? And then the shift that he describes is towards—and he contrasts that with the image from just 100 years later of people in reformed modernized prison of the 19th century being guided through their day by all of this kind of close monitoring and surveillance of their actions and behaviors which are constantly being observed and registered.
This is a very different image of power. You know, in this case, it both has to do with how power is executed on the body of a criminal, right? But in the second case, first of all, it’s invisible to most people; it’s taking place, it’s secreted away in a prison, you know, on the outskirts of the city or whatever. So it’s not visible. It’s operating through what he calls a micro physics at different points; it’s a kind of small accumulation of effects rather than this set of large spectacular effects.
And so I think the way he sees power evolving is towards this ever more kind of diffuse and decentralized form that, on one hand—and again, I think there are some sort of ambiguities here, right?—because he does have this sort of suspicion of a bigness that I think is characteristic of his era. But he also sees power in the current era as being distinguished by its diffusion, the way that it’s taking place in these kind of seemingly minor, perhaps invisible, or below the radar kind of ways. And that the overall evolution of power is towards more of this, is towards more of a kind of inscrutability and accumulation of small effects spread out over social space.
And this is, again, for this somewhat paranoid sensibility or mood or affect around his work, which reflects a kind of suspicion that you can see amply reflected in the relevant academic literature. Any kind of small activity you might be engaged in in the course of the day is, in some way, instantiating your position in a set of power relations. And I think there’s this idea that in earlier eras—which he doesn’t idealize or present nostalgically—that there’s just a way that, you know, for the majority of people in the Middle Ages, the power of the state just didn’t really reach them in much of their lives.
And that’s partly related to the fact that we had not entered—and this goes back to power knowledge, right?—that we hadn’t entered this era in which there’s a profusion of study and empirical observation of just all manner of things. And this, as he sees it, is coterminous with the expansion of the state into more and more realms of existence. And that, I think, is roughly—I hope that answers your question. I think that’s roughly how he sees the evolution of how power operates, which again creates a certain kind of mood or atmosphere of conspiracy.
But at the same time, it’s not conspiratorial in the sense that it tends to divert our attention away from any particular subset of agents and instead wants to look at how these systems operate in our lives and how everybody is, in some sense, subject to them rather than being the perpetrator of them or the overseer of them.
Yeah, you’re right that sometimes people will accuse Foucault of being obscurantist and just hiding what he means by power, not coming out and stating it. I’ve certainly had that experience reading him, so I really appreciate the answer. It’s a complex answer. It does feel like there’s some overlap with Schmidt. We’ll talk about the invisible law, right? He’ll talk about the law being most powerful when it cannot be identified. That’s when it’s most able to exercise a form of pure power—visibility to it.
Where I think actually this might be a good question, because I actually don’t know which way this goes: do you think Foucault was in some way writing in a more Straussian way about things that we just accept as obvious now, especially after the COVID pandemic? Or do you think that it basically really is just a kind of like semi conspiratorial people? But so was what straight up factual description of state collusion with academia, with news media—not in his day—but with social media companies in our day? Was it just a kind of version of that message that his contemporaries weren’t ready for? Or would he take serious disagreement with that description of how power works and what power is?
Yeah, it’s a tough question. There’s a way in which he probably—and again, I think this ambience—I worry you’re about to say a bit of both, which might be. Yeah, but I would situate him in this ambience of what I was calling left conspiratorial in that era, right? That there was just this sense of, you know, the man being against you. And I mean, that wasn’t necessarily how you would talk about it in France. But if you read just like the work of—or a really good text that I often return to is just that I think expresses a version of this—is Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, which was a controversial then and controversial now text about from really the origins of the new left counterculture.
But it expresses this mood of disaffection, of there being this system that controls everything, but that you’re alienated from and can’t quite seem to find meaningful agency within. And so I don’t know, there’s this whole kind of mood that’s just seemingly ambient among particularly intellectuals in this era. And this is why, for one thing, the schizophrenic becomes—and this is tied to the sort of popularization of anti-psychiatry—like the schizophrenic becomes a sort of cultural hero, right?
And the most famous illustration of this would be the film and book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, right? Where the schizophrenic is the ultimate rebel against mainstream society, right? And who, through his madness, sees the truths of the society, which is that there’s this vast conspiracy arrayed against you, just as an individual trying to get by. I think Foucault comes in and imbibes aspects of this mood that are current in both Europe and the United States.
And it’s notable that the French are obsessed with film noir, which is a genre that popularizes the same mood of disaffection and alienation in the sense of a system that’s pitted against the individual. And France absorbs some of this from American popular culture in this period. And I think Mailer talks about the jazz musician as another sort of—whatever this is, like the bebop and experimental jazz era. He talks about the jazz musician as another figure of kind of rebellion, a kind of cultural rebellion. And jazz, of course, was very significant in French culture at this time too.
But yeah, I think there’s this mood that he comes out of. But I’d say what he adds that’s unique at the moment that he’s writing is to say on some level, don’t—and I would also add here he’s doing a lot of his most important work after the failure of the ‘68 rebellion in France and the kind of larger failures of the new left.
And so in this period of the ’70s, which is one of retrenchment and greater pessimism—he’s coming out of this and saying on some level people had it wrong in imagining that there was this kind of discrete system that they were alienated from, that they could somehow rebel against. Like that, even though he’s very much, I’d say, attracted to the spirit of romantic rebellion, on some level, if you look at his career and his sort of political attractions, he’s also coming in the ’70s and saying there isn’t just this kind of system external to you that you can set yourself against and rebel against, because that would, in a way, be a sort of false reification of this one particular aspect of how the system operates.
Whereas in fact, the real way the system operates is much more on the level of just your constant reaffirmation of it through your own day-to-day behavior—that all of us are invested in and invested by power relations. Like even in our most mundane acts. And that’s so just imagining there’s this big alienated complex that you have to pit yourself against is to deny the extent of the problem.
And then the other interesting thing is that I would look here at Foucault’s longtime associate, Gilles Deleuze. Writes this text, “The Postscript on Societies of Control,” which was in part taking Foucault’s ideas that I was just describing a step further. And he is describing the shift away from, again, the sort of height of the mid-century culture of the big state, the big labor union, the big corporation that kind of encompassed your life in some way, and towards a more globalized political economy in which people’s existences are much more networked.
The way the state operates is much more outsourced. And it’s worth noting, with the whole Doge thing going on, like the actual sort of number of employees in the federal government has, contrary to how it’s sometimes presented, stayed relatively stagnant for 40 years or so. I believe in literal numbers, like it hasn’t really gone up that much. But that’s probably because a lot of that has been outsourced to all kinds of private entities.
And if you think back to the Snowden revelations, what was Snowden doing? Well, he was working for a subcontractor of the NSA. So this is a huge part of how the state has evolved. And part of what this means is it confirms, on one level, this idea that there isn’t just one big state for you to oppose, right? The state has actually decentralized itself and redistributed itself in its operations such that you can’t quite figure out where the state begins and ends.
And you saw this with the social media censorship during the pandemic, where you had these kind of weird anti-disinformation think tanks and so on that have been set up. And then you had these fact-checking websites which were connected to these odd non-profits. So you had this whole kind of weird—and this is why people talk about it as a complex—but you had this whole kind of weird diffuse network of entities that were interacting with each other.
And so I think—and sort of saying here as an aside—one thing that’s interesting if you compare the Trump administration so far is it is reverting to at least more sort of direct operations of state power, right? When it’s doing things like these deportations, it’s going back—it’s fascinating—it’s returning to, in a way, a much earlier form of sovereignty.
And I don’t know, I have mixed feelings about the book, about Benjamin Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real. I’ve written a whole critique of it, but I think he is right about one thing about Trumpian and related forms of populism, which is that they are—and he talks about it in specifically Foucaultian terms, right?—they are invested in this kind of an attempt to revert to these older operations of sovereignty of the sort I was talking about when I mentioned the public execution, right?
That there is this kind of sense of we need to have the state do big visible things in a highly central and public way and sort of manifest the power of the state that way, as opposed to through these kinds of weird diffuse, complicated labyrinthine operations that take place behind the scenes. So I think that’s an interesting contrast that I would say speaks to all of this.
Yeah, I’m really excited to talk about this. It relates to Agamben as well and his idea of homo sacre, because I think really what it is that we’re at the bottom of Foucault’s slippery slope, right? Foucault talks about this process of power knowledge, and if you take it as a slippery slope, what’s at the bottom of the slippery slope? It’s that we’re all insane now, right? And the bottom of the slippery slope was COVID. It was—to draw Agamben’s term homo sacre—it was declaring all human life as illegal by default.
And I think what’s interesting about the kind of Trump form of what liberals would call cruelty, right? Deportations, locking up people, threatening impeachment of judges, and prosecution of their enemies—is that it’s a sort of scapegoating that sends the message of those people don’t have rights. But in doing so, we can pretend that you still have rights. We can pretend that COVID never happened, that the tools of the state are only going to be used against you if you’re guilty. And it’s this big public demonstration of the other, of pure power politics applied to the other.
And I think the real Foucauldian reading—or at least my reading—is that it’s, yeah, it’s the kind of like law being revealed. It’s the last gasp of this kind of control mechanism. And either the control mechanism reasserts its legitimacy in this way of scapegoating, and to give the kind of Trump administration people their fair argument, you could say that like maybe you need some sort of scapegoating in order to prevent, you know, society as a whole from being scapegoated and being put under this control mechanism.
Yeah, or it just—or it finally collapses. Yeah, I think there’s an aspect to this that makes a lot of sense. As you said, part of what’s at stake here is some kind of ability to define what’s normal, which is also a very kind of Foucauldian question. And if the point is to—yes, I remember the phrase “the new normal.” It haunts me.
Yeah, and so if the point is to shift the rubric in terms… Of what’s normal and what’s abnormal. I’m fascinated by it. I’ve seen all these weird right-wing posts. Did you see this thing where it was—that guy Sargon of Akkad had this post that was like, “This is what society was like before mass immigration,” and all these other things? It was just like people in a specific place, but it was like this sort of late 90s or early 2000s music video. It was really strange because this was like society in some kind of age-old time of timeless traditions and so on, and then it was like an MTV video from 2002 or something. I can’t remember what it was, but I can probably look it up.
Then I saw this other one which I thought must be a troll, but it actually wasn’t, where some right-wing e-girl type posted this thing of—I swear it was Pamela Anderson or something from again, like the early 2000s—where it was like, “This is what women’s bodies used to look like before seed oils.” One of her—yes, the seed oil pre-1990s plastic surgery porn star basically. It’s like some kind of embodiment of natural womanhood. Very odd. But my point is there is this—this does represent something, which is that people do have a default sense of what’s normal, and it’s not even really that long ago. It’s probably long ago to be like before your conscious memory because you’re a young guy, but it’s basically the time that corresponds with my coming of age, and that of a lot of people who are very online today.
I think there is some sense that, yes, it’s just an attempt to reassert some version of normal that’s like that. So that does involve, as you said, these kinds of acts of scapegoating that may seem cruel and extreme. But I think you’re right that the point of them is to say, “We’re going to carve out—we’re going to reconquer the space of normality for the average citizen who doesn’t have to worry about these things,” because the people who are being hit by them are not average citizens, but these kind of outliers or figures who embody some sort of abnormality or counter-normative behavior or whatever.
I think that’s kind of about how I would understand what they’re trying to do. Again, on the symbolic level, I think there’s the level of the reassertion of some sort—basically the whole idea of the unitary executive is, in a sense, an attempt to reassert some kind of older form of sovereignty over and against this more diffuse form of sovereignty that’s triangulated through expertise and things like that, as we talked about.
You’re absolutely right about that. In some ways, it’s scaring people—in many cases literally—with the courts daring people to stop them. At least you’ll know where the power is, right? At least you’ll know like we’re doing the trial; we’re turning on the faucets, and if they’re leaky faucets, then they’ll leak somewhere. If they’re solid, then all the better for it. But we’ll at least try to use power and see how much exists anymore.
I’ve heard that as an explicit rationale. I think there’s a way in which it makes sense. One of the things that’s been interesting is I’ve had very extremely varied reactions to different things that have happened over the past couple of months. The other thing I wrote about was just maybe a little bit of a sidebar to what we’ve been talking about: this cutting off of NIH funding led to these universities ending graduate admissions for certain programs which aren’t even areas that would be covered by NIH funding.
The point I would make here is it makes you just again realize how bizarre and diffuse and indirect all of these operations are. There are different ways to interpret this; maybe they’re cutting the sociology program because they regard the microbiology program that was receiving NIH funding as more important, so they have to reallocate the resources there. But in some sense, that means that the government was indirectly funding people to do grad school in comp lit—by the way, full disclosure, I did—which definitely is not a good allocation of government resources to get people to do graduate programs in comparative literature for the simple reason that there just are no jobs in that field.
It makes no sense as an investment of any kind of resources. But the point is that there are all of these just multiply that by a million in terms of the extremely complicated intertwinedness of different kinds of private institutions in the state through funding and through other kinds of mandates and various kinds of outsourcing. It just makes you realize this is very complicated. There are so many other fascinating examples, like the USAID stuff where there are these kind of over-the-top claims.
They found out that they had all these pro subscriptions to media, and the more extreme version of that was like, “They’re just funding them, using USAID to fund Politico and the New York Times,” which definitely is not true. It’s just people with New York Times subscriptions. That version was absurd, but there is a sense that what’s being revealed are these extremely complicated networks that connect all kinds of private for-profit, non-profit, etc. entities to the state through this kind of impenetrable labyrinth of grants and services rendered contracts and all these kinds of things.
They’re going in with this wrecking ball and doing all this quite extreme stuff. Whatever else you might say about it, I have different views depending on which thing it is, but it’s certainly revealing a lot just about how this whole extremely convoluted system has evolved into this thing that nobody ever deliberately created. Nobody ever set out for it to look like this, but that is what the state became.
As an anecdote, I have a friend who’s running one of these new media publications. I don’t remember if this was public or not, but I’m not going to name who, but he basically said our main distribution strategy is to get on the approved publications list of some of these large firms, either traders, tech companies, and so on. That’s just going to skyrocket distribution, especially for premium subs. I think that’s a lot of this world is entirely funded by mechanisms like this—not entirely by the state but just fishing for approval in these massive institutions for their employees to be comped for these mostly unreasonably priced subscriptions. It’s just like a crazy market for this, apparently.
The underlying point is right though. You have—yeah, it feels like a very Foucauldian regime. Even if some of the people nominally are like arch enemies of Foucault, they have all this blame toward him. You should check out “Blame Theory” for more on that. Even as these people really blame Foucault, there’s an understanding of power as almost this Lovecraftian monster that I think is really evident in Foucault—or sorry, it’s somewhat evident in Foucault—and really evident in the new administration. I think they want to fight the monster, but they still don’t know the size and scale and powers of this creature as they’re seeing it.
I wanted to ask you something because you’re in the AI space. I read something—or I guess I’ve read a few things—about part of the Doge conception of the future of the state. Well, yeah, we can dismantle all this stuff because soon enough we’ll have some sort of AGI adequate to just take on a lot of these functions and do a better job of them. I mean, is this—I’ve heard people reporting that they’ve heard people kind of connected to this effort making these sorts of remarks. I’m curious to what extent you think this is a kind of positive vision of the state that’s being articulated by this sort of—or at least people involved in these efforts and people connected to this administration—or whether this is more of a new kind of conspiratorial discourse from the left that’s like they want to just dismantle the government and replace it with AI so that I guess sort of Elon Musk has ultimate control over all government functions.
Is there something to this? Is this just a new kind of left conspiratorial discourse, or is it another sort of somewhere in between? Using LLMs, definitely using AI models—actually, one of the important things I was agitating for the admin to do was to revise this OMB memo on AI adoption which basically made it really hard for public sector employees to use LLMs. I think there are perfectly reasonable non-conspiratorial reasons for this—just to use things that are actually useful to you.
In terms of that kind of fully automated luxury bureaucracy vision of AI, I don’t think it’s a plan right. It might be an aspiration; like it’s something that people talk about as “Oh, it would be cool if this happened.” But, number one, it’s pretty hard to pass those kinds of structured reforms through Congress. It’s pretty unsure what it would even mean to change the way XYZ service is fulfilled using AI unless you basically pass the agencies a blank check like the original FDROMB. So there’s not much of a clear path.
I think the conservative courts, the conservative justices on the courts have shown that they’re not down for the full Yarvin package. On the other hand, I think there’s something real in the idea that, just in terms of private power, AI is a new kind of control mechanism. Just as a function, even just giving read access of someone—like a CEO—to summarize every Slack message sent across their entire company and give a clear dashboard of what the zeitgeist of the company is—that’s new. That’s brand new. You couldn’t do that in 2018, and that is a new kind of—going back to the idea of the panopticon—that is a new power.
I think the American government will be one of the last places to adopt it, but that is real. What else is important in that kind of control layer is the ideological bias aspect where I think it’s one thing to have social media censorship where people are aware their speech is censored and they’re judging something as speech, but it’s very different if these are control processes on firm actions. If your company is booking a flight and there’s some kind of subtle command to prefer ESG flights or whatever, which was a real phenomenon—not in AI but just in some companies. Vivek actually was really famous for agitating against this at some point. This is a real control practice, but it can just happen much more silently if there become long-term embedded ideological biases in LLMs that are actually making decisions for people, and that’s something that I worry about.
Absolutely. It’s interesting what you bring up about the panoptic qualities of that. Something I definitely thought about when I was at a large employer is just having company email and the question of—I guess I just remember with certain things I was up to that were maybe slightly subversive vis-à-vis the employer, wondering—and again, this is pre-LLM breakthrough—pre-recent LLM breakthroughs. I always had a certain comfort in the idea that they can’t really just… there’s nobody who really has the time or manpower to go through all of these messages.
Subtle speech controls, the kind of subtle homo sacer illegal by default school of the American regulatory regime has always been cached in the idea that you can’t take it to its logical conclusion, right? That just doesn’t exist. It can’t even exist. It’s just not physically possible. That kind of fully being realized is something that I’m really worried about.
I think that point about this kind of goes back to the point about illegal by default; it goes back to that control societies piece that I recommend everybody check out because it does very much describe this and its possible trajectory. He’s interested in things like when he’s writing about this when it’s an early con that exists but it’s not widely implemented.
But then the China COVID regime—where you certainly had this kind of universal GPS tracking and the codes on your phone that determined your ability to enter or exit—if you read Bratton’s “Revenge of the Real,” one way you can read it is it really is a kind of positive manifesto for a sort of version of this control society. Bratton has been writing more about AI recently, and I need to look into that a bit more. He wrote a book about the whole world of effective altruism and also like counter-terrorism.
Both the speech controls and the mass surveillance aspect; I do really think it’s all tied together by philosophy because it is the idea that it’s all the internal threats now. It’s about the domestic terrorists; it’s about kind of total information control, total hybrid warfare, what is happening internally to have the panopticon turn internally. To be really ignorant comparatively of what those measures do to your ability to face outside threats, I think that’s been a total philosophical revolution in almost every area of society. It’s hard to draw the exact genealogy. You could say there are a few culprits: neoliberalism, the kind of war on terror, COVID. I think all of those are true in some aspects; all of those are like rungs on the ladder.
But I think this is the greatest political problem that I worry about on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, I think going back to—I have been thinking a lot about how really since October 7th, I would say it has felt like a kind of weird seesaw back into war on terror-era discourse but with this kind of overlay of all these things that have emerged in the intervening time. I think the way I tried to draw it out in a short tweet the other day was like—it’s basically the course of my adult life is like war on terror.
Then there’s the war on which has two different very different phases, right? Because Obama-era governance is still war on terror governance although it often isn’t remembered as such. Then you had the war on disinformation era, which is basically starting in 2016, and that kind of blends into, but is somewhat distinct from, the war on COVID era. Now we’ve reverted to a war on terror moment, which has proceeded in a few different phases.
There are certain themes from the Bush era that include the unitary executive. I suppose what’s interesting and ironic is that the Bush people had a much more competent operation in terms of people who were like the Trump 2.0 that is more competent than Trump 1.0 in terms of having more people within his apparatus who are actually aligned with his vision. But in the Bush era, you had these real veterans of veteran state functionaries who had spent their entire careers thinking about how the federal government works.
Yet they were unable to really execute the unitary executive theory because in various ways they were just thwarted in the process. That doesn’t say they weren’t; they were able to do certain things that reflected that theory. I think the fact that there’s a more—this was partly because the party itself was in a sense more robust as an entity, and there were enough sources of resistance from within the— and not resistance in the post-2016 sense, but just other people within the apparatus who had strong constituencies.
Those people were also committed to things continuing to operate the way they had rather than shift to this unitary executive model. Whereas now it just seems like you have a much less competent and knowledgeable group of people seeming to get away with a lot more. But I think that also reflects this kind of weakening of political structures, political institutions, and a broader crisis.
You can think of it as a crisis of hegemony or just a sort of disintegration of the shared kind of both the institutional networks but also the kind of shared ideological preconceptions that invested people in them. You end up with this weird situation where this seemingly quite weak and haphazard operation is—and again, I’m always hesitant to say is actually doing these things or is actually achieving these things because I think there’s some level at which it’s hard to tell what’s really happening and what’s some kind of…or it’s the Baudrillardian simulacrum.
There’s some integration of reality with simulation that makes it impossible and undecidable to figure out where one starts and the other stops. It just strikes me that there’s something weirdly both very strong and very weak, both about this operation and about the entities that it’s directed against. Part of me wonders how much that has to do with technology and the kind of partial sort of de facto automation of these processes on some level that they’re proceeding according to these logics that are already partly machinic or semi-automated. There’s a kind of weird evacuation of agency and of human.
I always say that we’ve invented the Mentats from Dune before we invented the thinking machines. We actually got an accountant just—that’s not a job for a human. This is not okay, and it’s actually a blessing that AI is coming along to do that. I know you have to be going soon. This was just an amazing discussion.
Thank you; it was a pleasure. It would be fantastic to have another discussion whenever it’s convenient for you. We cut off close to the kind of cliffhanger of what happens next, how to really think about the Trump administration. I think your insights just at the end here were great and what the censorship machine really was as well, because I think that we haven’t—not just us, but we, like the collective we, like America—has not fully unpacked that philosophically.
But thanks for coming on the podcast, Jeff. Thanks for having me; always a pleasure. Let’s talk again.