Can Foucault Teach Us Anything About Work?

The Archaeology and Genealogy of Work from the Classical Age to Neoliberalism

Abstract

This paper investigates the existence of a theory of labor in the work of Michel Foucault by drawing on the different moments in his oeuvre in which the question of labor is discussed, encompassing both his archaeological phase and his genealogical analyses, while also addressing the issue of subjectivation. It demonstrates the role labor plays in the Classical Age, as the negative counterpart of civilization in Madness and Civilization, before examining the epistemic transition through which labor emerges as a proper economic category in modernity (with Adam Smith and David Ricardo), becoming an objective transcendental. The article then articulates labor as an object of knowledge with the genealogy of labor qua labor, understood as a process embedded in disciplinary power dynamics, culminating in the biopolitics of productive populations. Finally, it explores the neoliberal mutation of labor, which decomposes it, in the image of capital, into human capital and income, resulting in the subjective figure of the entrepreneur of the self. The article concludes that the critique of the thesis of labor as an anthropological universal (identified by Foucault with a generic Marxist and neo-Hegelian “spirit of the times”), in favor of a situated archaeo-genealogical investigation of the modes of objectification and subjectivation of labor, constitutes the central object of Foucault’s concern with the theme.