The Count of Psyche : The birth of bio-politics and bio-ethics in early modern China
Joyce C. H. Liu
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[Vitalpolitik is] “a policy of life, which is not essentially orientated to increased earnings and reduced hours of work, like traditional social policy, but which takes cognizance of the worker’s whole vital situation, his real, concrete situation, from morning to night and from night to morning,” material and moral hygiene, the sense of property, the sense of social integration, etcetera, being in his view as important as earnings and hours of work.
Rüstow, quoted by F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 106; re-quoted by Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 157n.
Rüstow, quoted by F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 106; re-quoted by Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 157n.
Political economy … is not a system for controlling men’s actions, but for discovering how men are induced by their natural propensities to act.
John Hill Burton’s Chambers’s Educational Course: Political Economy for Use in Schools, and for Private Instruction, p. 49, emphasis mine.
John Hill Burton’s Chambers’s Educational Course: Political Economy for Use in Schools, and for Private Instruction, p. 49, emphasis mine.
1This essay examines the complicit hidden ties between the rise of liberalist economic subject and the discursive mode of domination of bio-ethical life in modern China. In late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there emerged a wide spread nexus of discourse related to the formulation of a powerful psyche-force of the new people for modern China. This mode of discursive formulation presents on the one hand the psyche that is an autonomous and free agent in the line of production for the individual’s own interest, while at the same time the psyche force is described as a countable, calculable, correctable, controllable and utilizable moral force or capital for the interest of the nation and the coming civil society. The individual at this converging point both as the liberalist political economic agent and as the ethical-calculable nationalist moral subject is then placed within the nationalist project of cultivation, training and correction. The aim of this essay is to answer the question why, in the Chinese context historically and culturally, the modern subject is so prone to the domination of the nationalist sentiments. I would like to argue that, long before the May Fourth intellectuals’ efforts to awake the enlightenment movement in the 1919, the mode of a governable and calculable modern subject had been established through the revolutionary intellectuals’ discursive responses to the contemporary world. It is what I called the moments of the birth of ethical-bio-politics in early modern China. In order to probe effectively into the complexity of this issue, I need to first run through the main argument in Foucault’s book The The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. I consider Fouault’s lectures of this year a significant link to his later lectures on the ethical subject and the hermeneutics of subject that point to the ambiguous problems of bio-politics of today.
1. The crossroads of political economy and the rise of new civil society
2In Foucault’s lectures during 1978-1979 on the birth of biopolitics, the double movement of the mechanism of liberalist political economic is closely studied and localized: on the one hand, it relies on the individual’s volunteering and autonomous commitment with his free will to work and to exercise his potential; one the other hand, it takes the entire life of the individual, including the physical and moral hygiene, into account for the management and production for the enterprise. According to Foucault, starting from the eighteenth century, there is the attempt in the discourse of political economy to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population. Foucault takes liberalism as a principle and method of the rationalization of the exercise of government, a rationalization that obeys “the internal rule of maximum economy.” (Foucault 2008: 318) Even though liberal thought starts from the civil society instead of the state, the question behind it is how to govern. In this line of thought, government becomes necessary and the justification of its existence defines the ends it pursues with regard to the particular society. The technology of a particular government and its forms of schematization is actually derived from the rationalization of the composition of that society. When the logic of political economy is superimposed on the logic of social governmentality, it gives rise to what Foucault called the “birth of biopolitics.”
3The intriguing problem about the liberalist economic subject or the economic man, homo oeconomicus, is that, although it is let alone to do his own work in the economic system, following the principle of laisser-faire, his is “eminently governable.” (Foucault 2008: 270) The individual would pursue his own interest, but his interest has already been posited in the way that it would converge spontaneously with the interest of others. Homo oeconomicus, according to Foucault, is actually the person “who accepts reality” and therefore “someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment,” and consequently “the correlate of a governmentality.” (Foucault 2008: 270-271) The paradox of the liberalist economic man Foucault presents in his studies points to the fact that, instead of an atom of freedom, the home oeconomicus is already a certain type of subject who precisely enable an art of government to be determined according to the principle of economy. This problem of home oeconomicus leads Foucault to reconsider the concept of subject introduced by English empiricism, that is, a subject not defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of body and soul, or by the presence of something marked by the Fall or sin, but a form of subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable. This irreducible and non-transferable point is the “regressive end point” of the rationality, judgment, reasoning, or calculation of the individual choices and is referred to the subject himself as “interest.” This “subject of interest,” whether it is related to self-preservation or to sympathy, is primarily based on “subjective will.” Even though subjected and constrained by the contract, the “subject of interest” remains, subsists and continues up to the time of the juridical contract and overflows the “subject of right.” (Foucault 2008: 272-274)
4The different logic governing the subject of interest and the subject of right is that the subject of right is by definition a split subject who acknowledges some natural and immediate rights but also agrees to the principle of self-renunciation, as what law and the prohibition function in the juridical system, but the subject of interest, according to the economists, never has to relinquish his interest. Foucault points out that in the eighteenth century, the figure of home oeconomicus and the figure of homo juridicus or homo legalis are heterogeneous and cannot be superimposed on each other. Foucault refers to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and stressed the importance of the “invisibility” of the hand of the “totality” which eludes the individual while at the same time founds the rationality of his egoistic choices and, Foucault adds, “if the totality of the process eludes each economic man, there is however a point where the whole is completely transparent to a sort of gaze of someone whose invisible hand, following the logic of this gaze and what it sees, draws together the threads of all these dispersed interest.” The invisibility of the collective good is essential to the process because the collective good “must not be an objective” and “cannot not be calculated.” (Foucault 2008: 278-280) No economic agent or political agent should or could account for the totality of the process of the collective good. Foucault writes:
Thus the economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable. It is originally and definitively constituted from a multiplicity of points of view which is all the more irreducible as this same multiplicity assures their ultimate and spontaneous convergence. Economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; economics is a discipline without totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state that he has to govern. Economics steals away from the juridical form of the sovereign exercising sovereignty within a state precisely that which is emerging as the essential element of a society’s life, namely economic processes. Liberalism acquired its modern shape precisely with the formulation of this essential incompatibility between the non-totalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign. (Foucault 2008: 282, emphasis mine)
5To Foucault, the heterogeneity and incompatibility of the economic world and the political-juridical world of the eighteenth century could serve as a critique of governmental reason. The basic function of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand is to disqualify the political sovereign. But, throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, different forms of socialism, state socialism and the state-controlled economy, all tried to work out some kind of definition of the economic sovereignty. The principle of laissez-faire in the physiocrats, for example, is to establish the correspondence between the sovereign and the economic processes or the economic agents, basing on the evidence and the Economic Table they constructed. It is here, Foucault says, that we find the idea that “economic agents must be allowed their freedom” and that “a political sovereignty will cover the totality of the economic process with a gaze in the uniform light, as it were, of evidence.” (Foucault 2008: 285-286)
6What Foucault offers is a very complex picture of the intersection and crossroad of the political economic and the political governmentality. According to Foucault, Adam Smith’s theory from the start was not meant to serve as governmentality rationality. “Economic science cannot be the science of government and economics cannot be the internal principle, law, rule of conduct, or rationality of government.” (Foucault 2008: 286) But, when the two incompatible worlds collate and superimposed on one another, the questions arises: how is the theory of the invisible hand served as the governmental rationality? How is the theory of civil society served as the converging point of political economic and governmentality rationality? The governability or governmentability of the economic subject is made possible through a “new ensemble” which makes him both subject of right and subject of economic agents, and this convergence brings in what Foucault calls “the liberal art of governing,” the field where such liberalist governmentality could exercise is “civil society.” (Foucault 2008: 294-295)
7Here is the crucial question that Foucault proposes in his seminar, and it is also the central concern of my current study: what is the rationality and the technology to govern, according to the rule of right, the civil society, a space of sovereignty which is inhabited by economic subject? Foucault points out that civil society is not a philosophical idea, but a concept of governmental technology, and the problem of civil society is “the juridical structure of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure.” Foucault writes:
And I think that civil society—which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation—makes a self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government, for reflection on this art of government and so for a governmental technology. … An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social. (Foucault 2008: 296)
8How should the subject be managed so that he can be left alone, laisser-faire, and work for his own interest while the whole nation or the civil society can benefit according to the rationality of the government? The omnipresent government is built upon these autonomous economic subjects. “Homo oeconomicus is, if you like, the abstract, ideal, purely economic point that inhabits the dense, full, and complex reality of civil society. Or, alternatively, civil society is the concrete ensemble within which these ideal points, economic men, must be placed so that they can be appropriately managed.” (Foucault 2008: 296) It is in this same ensemble of the technology of liberal governmentality that homo oeconomicus and civil society belong.
9The irony is clear here. The civil society invoked to resist against the government or the state, the state apparatuses or institutions, turns out to be the very thing that forms part of modern governmental technology. Foucault demonstrates how Adam Smith’s economic analysis is transformed in Furgerson’s text as the theories of civil society, combining Smith’s concept of nation, including viewing civil society as an historical-natural constant, with spontaneous synthesis of individuals, a permanent matrix of political power and that it constitutes the “motor of history.” The civil society or the nation is the motor of history precisely because it is not only the spontaneous synthesis and subordination but it also carries the element of dissociation, that is, the egoism of homo oeconomicus. The multiplications and modifications of the blind initiatives of the egoist interests and individual calculations are infinite, and the transformation of civil society is endless. This never-ending generation of history makes the formation of new social fabric possible. Also, civil society calls for a government as an organic component of the social bond as an organic feature of the form of authority. These characteristics make the civil society in Furguson’s text very different from that of Hobbes, Rousseau and Montesquieu because the economic problems are introduced into new technologies of government. (Foucault 2008: 298-308)
10The crossroads Foucault analyzes in Furguson’s text reveal a domain opening up of collective and political units which go beyond the purely economic bond, and yet without being purely juridical, and that this space cannot be superimposed on the structures of the contract and the game of rights. But, the demand for a new form of civil society gives rise to new forms of sovereign individuality basing on the strategy of interests of the individual sovereign, and to new forms of truth that is manifested through the rationality of history. Just as what Foucault points out, since the sixteen and seventeenth century in the West, the exercise of power has been adjusted according to calculation of force, relations, wealth and factors of strength. Rationality becomes the foundation of modern forms of governmental technology. Different forms of rationality, the rationality of the sovereign state, of economic agents, of the governed, speak about different ways of calculating and regulating the art of government. The principle of rationality of the nationalist and statist politics as well as the rationality of the truth regime continue in spite of the transformations of the technologies of governmentality. The birth of the new forms of calculation and regulation of the civil society or the nationalist state in the twentieth century, ways of governing the population, including health, hygiene, birth, race, and so on, is founded precisely through the long process of the discourse of political economy since mid-eighteenth century down to the nineteenth century.
11To me, the problem lies more in how in such crossroads and intersections, with the cleaving up and opening of new space for civil society, even though the juridical system and economic bond has not been established yet, the discursive modes of new ways of calculation and regulation has already infiltrated in the same texts. The crucial question is: how the individual in the society, a society in the making, a society that is invoked to rebel against the present government, is accounted for the rise either of a new civil society or a new nation state, and through what irreducible rationality and reasoning these individuals are posited. The texts that I would like to examine in this current essay point to what I called the moments of the birth of ethical-bio-politics in modern China. I would like to argue that, in late Qing China, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of the republic’s revolution, and twenty years before the May Fourth Enlightenment Movement, the emerging new mode of discourse on the “count” of psyche among the intellectuals gives rise to the rationality of psyche ruling for later governments. With the borrowed Western knowledge of modern physics and chemistry on the one hand, and the theories of political economy and the civil society/nation state on the other hand, Chinese intellectuals, through the aids of the missionaries in China and the translated texts from Japan, build up a mode of hermeneutics on psyche that stresses on the countable, utilizable, controllable, accumulative, and correctable nature of psyche. Psyche force was described as the force, using the metaphor of electricity, to be tamed and directed so that it can serve the aims of the State. Moreover, the individual’s psyche force was accounted as part of the national capital and as a share that is responsible for the production of the national interest, in Benthamian reasoning. Liang Qichao’s essay on the “New People” was an exemplary text that demonstrated how the ethical subject was constructed in the way that the bio (life) and the ethics of the individuals were discursively formulated in an ethico-political-economic to contribute to the collective good defined in the name of nation.
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