Recent comments by Eric and John on Foucault’s reading of Adam Smith have made me think about one aspect of Smith’s argument about domestic industry in Wealth of Nations IV.ii; and about the phenomenological aspect of Foucault’s thought.
Smith begins by arguing that ‘domestick industry’ benefits from the ‘invisible hand’, so that the individual with capital directs it to the use of domestic industry rather than foreign industry, for reasons of self interest rather than public good. It is only that this individual does not only think of the ‘revenue of society’, not that he is completely unaware of it. Foucault’s reading is typically schematic in seeing this passage as being about the complete invisibility of the public good. That schematism is part of Foucault’s creativity, but we should always be particularly careful about distinguishing between the sources Foucault uses and the way he uses them in service of developing a schema. Getting back to Smith, he moves onto the argument that free trade is better for a society than protectionism, that is that the revenue of a society benefits more from trade with other countries than the situation in which the stare creates impediments to that trade. This is a shift away from the initial point, and consciously or not, Smith is using a rhetorical strategy to move the hypothetical reader, who prefers state direction of the economy, to first accept free trade within a national economy, and then international free trade.
Returning to the invisibility of the hand, this is fascinating for Foucault, I suggest, because of an underlying familiarity with phenomenology, which clearly takes a lot from Merleau-Ponty as well as Heidegger though Foucault never chooses to to refer to Merleau-Ponty in his publications or lectures. A peculiar situation made even more peculiar when we remember that Merleau-Ponty was one of Foucault’s undergraduate teachers. However, the text by Merleau-Ponty that is key here is The Visible and the Invisible, sadly left unfinished on Merleau-Ponty’s death.
Let us look at a substantial passage of the elaboration that Foucault has to make on invisibility in Smith
For there to be certainty of collective benefit, for it to be certain that the greatest good is attained for the greatest number of people, not only is it possible, but it is absolutely necessary that each actor be blind with regard to this totality. Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic agents are absolutely necessary. The collective good must not be an objective because it cannot be calculated, at least, not within an economic strategy. Here we are at the heart of a principle of invisibility. In other words, what is usually stressed in Smith’s famous theory of the invisible hand is, if you like, the “hand,” the existence of something like providence which would tie together all the dispersed threads. But, I think the other element, invisibility, is at least as important. Invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect nature of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account. Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good. (The Birth of Biopolitics, 279-280.)
The invisibility in Merleau-Ponty is what comes at the limit of visibility, as its condition, because we cannot see ourselves looking, something Merleau-Ponty extends into a discussion of touching, and invisibility the necessary background to visibility, which must have a shape defined by invisibility. The phenomenal world must be opaque to us, because the phenomena can only exist as such in a gap between what perceives and what is perceived.
One way of thinking of Foucault’s reading of Smith is that he sees Smith as a phenomenologist of political economy, exploring the opacity of the phenomenal world of trade, production, labour, investment and so on. The invisible hand is a master metaphor, or attempted one, clarifying what cannot be completely clear, demonstrating the impossibility of pure visibility. The emphasis on the shift away from previous ways of thinking about wealth, is part of a phenomenological account of shifting perception, applied to the epistemic development. The epistime has to be understood as a structure which is phenomenological, and therefore as concerned with the limits of the grasp of the phenomenal. Smith’s rhetorical shift from domestic investment to international free trade, could be take as confirming that structure. Since we cannot grasp the phenomenon of the economy as a global whole, which includes changing interrelations between national economies, themselves composed of changing relations between economic factors, we can use rhetoric to manipulate the partial invisibility of the economy to the advantage of an argument for free trade in every respect.
This engagement with phenomenology is more explicit on Biopolitics p. 121, where Foucault refers to the Ordoliberals, as anti-naturalist, on the model of Husserl. In Foucault’s account they move away from the naturalism of the original political economists, like Smith, to a belief that the market economy is a product of institutions, as well as spontaneous interactions, so is not to be explained by a natural process of development as we find in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in other thought of that time which sees human history as a story of natural development. So Smith just manages one stage of phenomenological insight, which is taken in an anti-naturalist direction by the first ‘Neoliberals’.