Reason & Governmentality: The Problem of the Series

On the homology between Kant's regulative principles of reason and Foucault's 'historical schema' of governmentality.

I. Modes of reason, modes of governmentality

For reason to secure unified and systematic knowledge Kant presents three regulative principles in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason: (1) the principle of homogeneity, (2) the principle of specification, and (3) the logical law of the continuum of species of logical forms and its transcendental presupposition, the transcendental law of the continuity of nature.¹

Similarly, in his lectures on ‘governmentality,’ Foucault presents a “historical schema”² of ‘governmentality’ also in three modes: (1) the legal mechanism, (2) the disciplinary mechanism, and (3) the security apparatus.³ For Foucault, all three modes are different expressions of the same ‘ugly word’ — ‘governmentality’ — that can vary in intensity depending on the historical moment.

In both cases one cannot clearly delineate one mode from another.⁴ Just as in reference to his three regulative principles Kant describes how “the last [continuity] arises by uniting the first two [homogeneity and specification],” the same is the case for the security apparatus in reference to the legal and disciplinary mechanisms.

What I want to argue is that Foucault’s ‘historical schema’ functions with respect to governmentality the same way Kant’s regulative ideas function with respect to reason. The interest of Kantian reason is therefore identical to the interest of governmentality. They are homologous; one is a transcendental argument made at the level of politics regarding the condition of possibility of ‘civil society’ (subtended by ‘the state’), the other is at the level of the condition of possibility of experience. Both deal fundamentally with ‘the problem of the series,’ its management, and the projection of a systematic unity granting order and coherence.

II. The problem of the series

What is this ‘problem of the series’ to which reason and governmentality are supposedly solutions? For Kant, human reason is faced with a demand for unity in the face of a seemingly infinite series of correlations encounters in the world of appearances.⁵ This demand is best expressed in the following passages:

It is indeed difficult to understand how there can be a logical principle by which reason prescribes unity of rules unless we also presuppose a transcendental principle whereby such a systematic unity is a priori assumed to be necessarily inherent in the objects…We must therefore, in order to secure an empirical criterion, presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary.⁶

But this logical maxim can only become a principle of pure reason through our assuming that if the conditioned is given, the whole series of conditions, subordinated to one another—as series which is therefore itself unconditioned—is likewise given, that is, is contained in the object and its connection.⁷

This demand for systematicity is a principle in the transcendental sense as it neither prescribes, determines, nor constitutes any object in the field of appearances. It is that which must be presupposed for concepts to secure empirical criterion at all. For Kant, finite human subjects with ‘sensible’ rather than ‘intellectual’ intuition necessarily act as if an unconditioned unity has already been given by making a rational and practical assumption of the unity of appearances.

In line with his ‘Copernican revolution,’ the unconditioned unity is therefore given to nature by reason and is not already an objective characteristic of nature itself: “reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws.”⁸ The series of correlations in experience and the inability to ascend at any final determination therefore necessitates assuming an a priori regulative unity. The three modes referred to in section I are the specific modes in which this demand is articulated.

Foucault meanwhile argues that ‘governmentality’ is, “organized by reference to the problem of security, that is to say, at bottom, to the problem of the series.”⁹ Just as human reason initially encounters the never-ending series of unorganized correlations, governmentality encounters, “an indefinite series of mobile elements: circulation, x number of carts, x number of passers-by, x number of thieves” etc.¹⁰ The implicit demand is to establish the conditions of possibility for the management and control of these "mobile elements," the projection of unity and systematicity onto them, and the subsequent articulation of a division between “society” and the “state.” Foucault describes, “a specific field of naturalness peculiar to man... which will be called civil society, [that] emerges as the vis-à-vis of the state [or governmentality].”¹¹

While the problem of the series in the Foucauldian context is mentioned specifically in his initial description of the mechanism of security, we will see how each mode of governmentality offers alternative solutions to the problem of the series and, in so doing, ascends to an “estimate of probabilities” that is only possible after a field of naturalness (‘civil society’) has been projected onto it. It is this projection that typifies the security apparatus—the mode of governmentality par excellence.

III. Law & homogeneity

Kant expresses reason’s demand for unity first of all in the form of a logical maxim: “find the unconditioned for conditioned cognitions of the understanding, with which its unity will be completed.”¹² The first interest of reason is therefore a tendency to ascend in pursuit of the unconditioned. For Kant it is intrinsic to reason that it has a “propensity to overstep all boundaries”—to keep ascending to the final condition. This propensity manifests itself in the problem of taxonomic classification:

a certain systematic unity of all possible empirical concepts must be sought insofar as they can be derived from higher and more general ones: this is a scholastic rule or logical principle, without which there could be no use of reason, because we can infer from the universal to the particular only on the ground of the universal properties of things under which the particular properties stand.¹³

Kant defines this propensity as the principle of homogeneity as it asserts the “sameness of kind in the manifold under higher genera,”¹⁴ which is representative of that speculative tendency of thought that is “hostile to differences in kind,”¹⁵ and concerned primarily with universality.¹⁶ It is this yearning for a universal condition that is the peculiar fate of reason, for when reason extends and finds security in “principles that overstep all possible use in experience,”¹⁷ it finds itself awash in illusion, the liberation from which is possible through critique.¹⁸

Relevant to the specific purpose here is that when faced with the unorganized manifold of phenomena, the tendency of reason according to the principle of homogeneity is to move higher and higher towards a universal category applicable to the entire domain of phenomena—to act as if the infinite diversity of phenomena can be classified perfectly and completely.

There is a similar principle of ascension at work in Foucault’s description of the legal mechanism. The solution to the disorder presented by the problem of the series from the perspective of law is that of prohibition applicable within a specific domain or territory; via, “the system of the legal code with a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited.”¹⁹ Said legal structure is certainly universal in that it applies to all elements—or rather, legal subjects—within a given space or territory. Just as the presupposition of the unity of reason is, “that of the form of the whole of cognition, which precedes the determinate cognition of the parts and contains the conditions for determining a priori the place of each part and its relation to the others,”²⁰ the presupposition of law is a form (a space or territory) and the violent delineation of a legal territory.

The function of the legal mechanism is therefore to “give greater definition to things that are prohibited.”²¹ Law focuses with greater and greater precision on prohibition through either an increase in the number of laws or the continual refinement of the legal structure itself. The tendency is therefore to perpetually ascend to a (Sisyphean) situation of complete codification or refinement. It is perhaps for a similar reason that Kant chooses to introduce the interest of reason to ascend to the unconditional as analogous to “an ancient wish – who knows how long it will take until perhaps it is fulfilled – that in place of the endless manifold of civil laws, their principles may be sought out; for in this alone can consist the secret, as one says, of simplifying legislation.”²²

At the time of Kant’s first critique in the late 18th century, the Prussian Legal Code did not just regulate civil law. With a legal code of 19,000 different legal provisions, the genuiney hope of Prussian authorities was the perfect and total regulation of social life through law.²³ Kant’s designation of the dogmatic rationalist metaphysicians as ‘despotic’ is intertwined with this idea that the rationalist metaphysical position leads to kind of despotism by law at the level of philosophy via the conviction that law can prohibit perfectly and completely.²⁴ Another way to phrase this would be to argue that the legal mechanism starts from the perspective of disorder and asks itself, ‘what are the conditions of possibility of complete order?’ and answers by the attempt to ascend to that universal legal principle that will provide such conditions.

IV. Discipline and Specification

The logical principle of reason Kant opposes to the law of homogeneity is the law of specification which, “has its aim the systematic completeness of all cognitions, if, starting with the genus, I descend to whatever manifold may be contained in it, and thus in this way seek to secure extension for the system.”²⁵ It is still concerned with taxonomy, but, as it were, attempts to classify by moving in the opposite direction. “Every genus requires different species, and these subspecies, and since none of the latter once again is every without a sphere…reason demands in its entire extension that no species be regarded as in itself the lowest.”²⁶

The interest of reason is therefore, “content in respect of the manifoldness of species.”²⁷ Whereas the law of homogeneity is concerned solely with the form of the concept applicable to the manifold of phenomena, the tendency of specification is to grasp the infinite manifold not via a universal form that, if you like, stands above it, but to “constantly seek to split nature into so much manifoldness that one would almost have to give up the hope of judging its appearances according to general principles.”²⁸

The principle of homogeneity is therefore despotic insofar as it is hostile to difference, while the principle of specification taken to its conclusion would not allow reason to approach nature at all, as reason, “must approach nature with its principles in one hand.” To make the homologous argument within the realm of law, reasoning exclusively according to the principle of specification would be to give up on the search for that “ancient wish.” Insofar as it realizes the futility of complete codification, it gives up on the very idea of codification at all. It is in precisely this sense that Kant describes the philosophical position of skepticism as anarchic and its practitioners as, “shatterers of civil unity.”²⁹

The interest of the law specification is therefore the determinacy of the content of the manifold. It is this dual-tendency of reason to ascend according to the principle of homogeneity and descend according to the principle of specification that is ‘the dialectic of pure reason’ explored in the Transcendental Dialectic section of Kant's first critique.

Compare this ‘principle of specification’ to the way Foucault describes discipline as that which, “functions to the extent that it isolates a space, that it determines a segment.”³⁰ “In the system of law,” as Foucault puts it, “what is undetermined is what is permitted; in the system of disciplinary regulation, what is determined is what one must do, and consequently everything, being undetermined, is prohibited.”³¹ If we take law in this specific instance to have a primarily negative function—it is concerned with what one cannot do—we can say the function of discipline is positive in the sense that its focus is on how conduct conducive to order can be prescribed to a given series of mobile elements; i.e., to determine the content within a constructed space.

Discipline, “regulates everything…allows nothing to escape.”³² From a disciplinary perspective it is not enough just to leave a given element to itself (or it may disobey); rather, its concern is with the particular elements and their construction and production of elements given a norm. Thus Foucault’s aim in Discipline and Punish is to show how the prison qua panopticon functions not simply as a mode of punishment, but as paradigmatic for a whole series of institutions whose function is to create or produce certain types of subjects—‘docile bodies’ optimal for schooling, factory work, military regiments, etc.³³ The disciplinary mechanism attempts to ‘fill the gap’ left by the impossibility of complete legal regulation so that the possibility of an element that disobeys is negated through the determination of those very elements.

Whereas the legal mechanism is concerned with universal principles as the condition of possibility of order, discipline is concerned with the specification and determination of the variety of particular elements. Discipline is concerned with the production of particular elements rather than the form these elements obey, in the same sense that the interest of the principle of specification is concerned with the determinacy of content rather than universal domain under which lie the manifold of phenomena.

V. Security and continuity

Through the “systematic connection”³⁴ of the two arises a third logical law, one which, “offers a continuous transition from every species to every other through a graduated increase of varieties”³⁵ and therefore “prepares the field for the [faculty of the] understanding.” The combination of diversity and homogeneity and the affinity that arises out it guarantees the systematicity of reason; i.e., a field of vision whereby phenomena appear unified and within which concepts can be deployed. However this field only appears as if it arises after the combination of homogeneity and specification. The third logical law itself must presuppose that phenomena always already appear unified; it presupposes what Kant calls the transcendental law of the continuity of nature.³⁶ This systematicity is therefore not constitutive of phenomena; rather, “systematic unity (as mere idea) is only a projected unity”—a necessary projection onto phenomena that is the condition of possibility of cognition.

I have tried to show how both the legal mechanism outlines a territory and functions negatively in the sense that it enforces certain prohibitions, as well as how discipline functions positively insofar as its interest is in determining or producing types of subjects that will act as if certain conduct are already prohibited. For Foucault, that which differentiates the apparatus from security from the legal or disciplinary modes is that security “let’s things happen” in the sense of laisser-faire.³⁷ Why can the security apparatus afford to do so?

Towards the end of the lectures on Security, Territory, and Population, Foucault provides an historical outline of political thought with regard to ‘nature.’ For Foucault, medieval political thought, broadly speaking, defined good government and a well ordered kingdom as part of a greater cosmological-theological order; where ‘society’ is a reflection of some theological great chain of being.³⁸ With the advent of the monarchical principle of raison d’etat and that of the 'modern state’ arises a “new reality with its own rationality…a non-naturalness, an absolute artificiality.”³⁹ For Foucault, it is the rational management of this 'new reality with its own rationality' which is the modern realm of politics (politiques) par excellence.

“The politiques were those who said: Let’s leave aside this problem of the world and nature; lets look for the reason intrinsic to the art of government; let’s define a horizon that will make it possible to fix exactly what should be the rational principles and forms of calculation specific to an art of government.”⁴⁰

The specific actually existing institutional correlate of raison d’etat is, for Foucault, the police and their specific, “interest in what men do…in their activity, their ‘occupation.’”⁴¹ Yet with the economistes—and the subsequent shift in view of the state from guarantor of order to a “regulator of interests”⁴²—there arises a new naturalness not, “of the processes of nature itself, as the nature of the world, but a process of naturalness specific to relations between men, to what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work, produce…”⁴³ In other words, a field of naturalness qua society (‘civil society’) which functions according to the natural functioning of equilibrating forces if the state “lets things be.”

What is important however is that the condition of possibility of this field of ‘new naturalness’ are precisely those legal and disciplinary mechanisms discussed previously. It is only insofar as law controls the series of elements at the level of prohibition and the disciplinary apparatuses produce elements conducive to order that naturalness can then, retrospectively, remerge in the form of civil society where, “the good of all will be assured by the behaviour of each when the state, the government, allows private interest to operate, which, through the phenomena of accumulation and regulation, will serve all.”⁴⁴ The 'all' to which this new naturalness is inservice here comes in the form form of the health of a specific population.

Earlier in the lectures Foucault refers to “the game of liberalism” as one which involves, “not interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course...basically and fundamentally it means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself.”⁴⁵

Just as, for Kant, the condition of possibility of systematicity arises out the dialectic of reason—i.e., its concern for (1) homogeneity qua domain and universality and (2) diversity qua content and particularity—the condition of possibility of the artificial naturalness of contemporary civil society arises out of (1) a legal mechanism concerned with domain and universality in the form of law and (2) a disciplinary mechanism concerned with the construction of particular orderly elements, the circulation of which is facilitated by the police. It perhaps for this reason that Foucault describes the state as “the regulatory idea of governmental reason.”⁴⁶

VI. Enlightenment & Critique            

This movement from myth (the cosmological-theological order held together by a great chain of being) extirpated by novel forms of reason (such as that wielded by the politiques) in the interest of the production of a ‘new naturalness’ qua civil society (as asserted by the economistes) is also articulated in Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Frankfurt School more generally, wherein Enlightenment rationality liberates us from an omnipotent and heterogeneous nature only to enslave us to the objectification of both nature and man.

“Civilization,” for Adorno & Horkheimer, “is the victory of society over nature which changes everything into pure nature.”⁴⁷ In terms of the totalitarianism of enlightenment reason, there is a sense then in which Foucault furnishes a kind of historical narrative for the process of disenchantment articulated by Adorno & Horkheimer, who locate the kernel of this disenchantment in Kant's philosophy. Hannah Arendt too, in her discussion of Hobbes’s state of nature, argues, “this new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it.”⁴⁸ Civil society becomes the systematic projection of ‘artificial naturalness’ whose function is the control a given series of elements.

What I have tried to show is that the interest of each mode of governmentality is homologous to each principle of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic; however, one might speculatively reverse this procedure and attempt to locate Kant’s critical philosophy within this Foucauldian chronology of governmentality. The historical conjuncture at which Kant’s first critique appears (1781) is, after all, precisely that era of the explosion of the disciplinary mode of governmentality and the birth of the discipline of political economy. The question might then become in what sense is the Kantian philosophical mode of critique related to, or perhaps, a mere reflection at the level of philosophy of this historical juncture.

Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ was, after all a critique of all hitherto philosophy—an attempt at precisely a “discipline of pure reason,” as he himself admits. Indeed, Kant admonishes those who might deny critique any positive function as being precisely akin to claiming that, “the police are of no positive utility because their chief business is to put a stop to the violence.”⁴⁹ For Kant, after all, illusion is natural and inevitable for reason, for, “even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, [it] will not cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction.”⁵⁰ The principles of reason therefore must be regulative; i.e., they must act as a sort of balance between the competing forces of reason; between that of the dogmatic rationalists and that of the anarchic sceptics.

Towards the end of the lecture on the 22nd of March, Foucault announces, “a new theoretical and analytical strata, this element of political reason, is force…we enter a politics whose principal object will be the employment and calculation of forces.”⁵¹ If we take the first critique to be a sort of “metaphysics of the balance of forces of reason,” is not Kant’s idea of voluntary servitude embodied in the ‘public use of reason,’ that “balance of forces” at the level of society par excellence? To put it another way, are the disciplinary and legal mechanisms not responsible for the production of historical conditions of possibility of this seemingly reasonable voluntary servitude, after which government can “let things be” and calculate its own actions around the calculation of an average (as in that of the economistes).

Can one then be surprised that, unlike the Kantian critique which is a critique of hitherto philosophy, that a critique of the security apparatus—of the production and circulation of subjects—had to necessarily take the form not of a critique of philosophy, but of political economy; in other words, of economists who determine those statistical averages around which the social is governed?

1. See A658/B686 and A306/B636 where reason is presented as “a subjective law of economy for the provision of the understanding.” See also A646/B674. All references from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) trans. Allen Wood and Paul Guyer . Henceforth referred to as CPR.

2. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-78, (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 6. Henceforth referred to as STP.

3. Ibid

4. Michelle Grier points out Kant expresses this demand for systematic unity in a variety of undifferentiated ways. To list just a few other than the principles described, it is expressed in the form of the purposive unity of things (A686/B714), the idea of a maximum (A665/B693), and the idea or presumption of a ground or substratum (A696/B693). As Grier puts it, “he appears to view each of these as an expression of the more general demand for systematic unity.” See Michelle Grier, “Kant on the Systematic Unity of Knowledge,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 14(1) 1997: 3. Similarly, in Foucault’s text, governmentality is not limited to the three modes discussed above. In other words, the process of “crystallization” of a variety of historical and ideological factors he describes is not limited to them. He discusses different aspects of governmentality in terms of ‘pastoral power’ and Greek forms of sovereignty for example. Indeed, the very first lecture of the lecture series claims what follows will be about ‘biopower.’ At what level of analysis biopower is vis a vis ‘governmentality is left unaddressed at least in this lecture series.

5. My account of Kant’s discussion of the systematicity of knowledge owes much to Grier. Beyond her article (see ref. above), see Michelle Grief, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

6. CPR, A651/B679

7. CPR, A308/B365

8. CPR, Bxiv

9. STP, 20

10. Ibid

11. STP, 349

12. CPR, A308/B365

13. CPR, A652/B680

14. CPR, A658/B686

15. CPR, A655/B683. I.e. dogmatic rationalism rather than anarchic skepticism.

16. Ibid

17. CPR, Aviii.

18. For Kant, once the understanding stretches using principles that bring us beyond the realm of the empirical, one has entered the realm of ‘Transcendental Illusion.’ This leads to the ‘hypostatization’ of ‘objects’ that lie outside of experience, such as ‘God’ or the ‘soul.’ A critique of transcendental illusion is necessarily a “critique of the understanding and reason in regard to their hyperphysical use.” cf. Howard Caygill, Kant Dictionary, (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995): 79-80.

19. STP, 5

20. CPR, A645/B673

21. STS, 46

22. CPR, B358/A302

23. Thomas Lundmark, Charting the Divide Between Common Law and Civil Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 297.

24. CPR, Aix

25. CPR, A655/B683

26. Ibid

27. Ibid

28. Ibid

29. CPR, Aix.

30. STP, 44

31. STP, 46

32. STP, 45

33. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin, 1991).

34. CPR, A658/B686

35. CPR, A661/B689.

36. CPR, A661/B689.

37. STP, 45

38. STP, 349, esp. the lecture on 8 March, pp.227-248.

39. Ibid

40. STP, 348

41. STP, 322

42. STP, 346

43. STP, 349

44. STP, 346

45. STP, 48

46. STP, 286

47. Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London: Verso, 1997): 186.

48. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harvest Court, 1994): 141

49. CPR, Bxxvi

50. CPR, A298/B355

51. STP, 295