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Economic Rhetoric as TaxisCatherine Chaput & Joshua S. HananPublished online: 15 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Catherine Chaput & Joshua S. Hanan (2015) Economic Rhetoric as Taxis,Journal of Cultural Economy, 8:1, 42-61, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2014.942349

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ECONOMIC RHETORIC AS TAXISNeoliberal governmentality and the dispositifof freakonomics

Catherine Chaput and Joshua S. Hanan

Received 16 Jan 2014; Accepted 27 Jun 2014

This essay expands the rhetoric of economics conversation started by economist Deirdre

McCloskey. Through a close engagement with Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France

from 1975 to 1979, concerning the dual problematics of liberalism and biopolitics, we argue for

theorizing economic rhetoric as a governmental problem of order, or taxis, which arranges value

among divergent subjects beyond the dichotomies of material/cultural and global/local. This

approach toward rhetoric, we further contend, takes as its strategic form what Foucault and

Agamben have called a dispositif. We demonstrate this premise through a case study of Stephen

Dubner and Steven Levitt’s notion of freakonomics, suggesting that it can be understood as a

rhetorical dispositif working within the broader political rationality of neoliberal governmentality.

We end by gesturing toward a rhetoric of the common as an alternative to the dispositif of

freakonomics.

KEYWORDS: rhetoric of economics; biopolitics; agency; freakonomics; neoliberalism

Economics has been an object of rhetorical study since the publication of DeirdreMcCloskey’s book The Rhetoric of Economics. Her seminal contribution transformed a looseresearch program, which viewed economic rhetoric as a subset of presidential address,into a recognized and coherent area of study (Aune 2001; Hanan 2013). Engaged in earlystages of the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI), McCloskey critiqued theassumption that economics was an objective social science by analyzing the discourseof influential economic thinkers such as Gary Becker, John Muth, and Robert Fogel.1 Sheargued that these and other economists used ‘modes of argument’ that were ‘not verydifferent from Cicero’s speeches or Hardy’s novels’ (McCloskey 1985, p. 48). In its haste tokeep up with the natural sciences, the discipline of economics, McCloskey claimed,became too fixated on statistical significance and disinterested calculation. Instead, sheadvocated a more inductive and historically embedded approach toward economics, onethat paid particular attention to the contingency of language in the representation ofeconomic phenomena.

To a great degree, McCloskey’s book is a humanizing project, one concerned withreconnecting economics to a past steeped in deliberation and moral philosophy. Byaligning rhetoric with a neo-Aristotelian tradition – extending all the way from Cicero andQuintilian to enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and Hugh Blair – McCloskey(1985) conceptualizes economic rhetoric as an instrumental techne that encourageseconomists to examine their ‘language in action, and converse more politely with others in

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the conversation of mankind’ (p. 35). It is for these reasons that Philip Mirowski (1988)describes her rhetorical project as one of style rather than substance. Leaving unstatedthe assumption that economists discover reality and simply use rhetoric to communicatethat knowledge more effectively, McCloskey foregoes exploring how rhetoric makespossible the privileging of economics as a discrete category of inquiry as well as how itshapes disciplinary knowledge. Even her recent work, which outlines a complex pathwaythrough which rhetoric enables capitalism to flourish, does so with an understandingthat rhetoric is epiphenomenal to the ‘science’ of economics (see McCloskey 2006,2010a).

Critical rhetorician James Arnt Aune (2001) has engaged McCloskey extensively onthis point of separation, preferring to view rhetoric as constitutive of economicknowledge.2 He argues that without first locating the ‘social and institutional constraintson rhetorical invention’ (p. 178), McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics will perpetuate thetendency in economics to quantify all elements of cultural experience. Theorizingeconomics as a problem of embedded power relationships, Aune’s scholarship alignsrhetorical agency with the production of subjectivity as much as it does instrumentalpersuasion. However, his conservative reading of Marxist theory has the effect ofestablishing a new economic foundationalism that negates the important insights of hiscritical approach.3 By conceptualizing power as a repressive dialectic between twoeconomically constituted class agents, rather than in Foucauldian (1977) terms asirreducibly heterogeneous and always already productive, his critical reformulation ofthe rhetoric of economics offers an alternative viewpoint – one less friendly to capitalism –which nonetheless maintains the same instrumental relationship between the economyand rhetoric as McCloskey.4 Because both understand rhetoric as a representationalexpression of a more primordial economic reality, power negotiation becomes confined todiscovering the language that correctly describes economics as an a-priori condition.

Cognizant of the limitations of such a perspective, Ronald Walter Greene (2004) hasoffered an entirely different approach toward economic rhetoric. Working in theautonomous tradition of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 2004, 2009), Greeneoffers a different engagement with the relationship between rhetoric and capitalism.He argues ‘that a new ontology of production is afoot’ (p. 200), and thus we shouldexplore how rhetorical agency works through biopolitics, a critical problematic thatcenters on the material and discursive production of value. Whereas McCloskey and Auneboth confine rhetoric to ‘the success or failure of strategic actors’ (Greene 2006, p. 85), abiopolitical conception of economic rhetoric examines ‘the role that rhetoric plays asa practice, process, and product of economic, political, ideological, and cultural value’(Greene 2004, p. 202). Not limited to a technical function in clarifying economicphilosophy or discursively mediating class antagonism, rhetoric, in Greene’s view, isinstead immanent to the biopolitical terrain – it is ever present in the production andorganization of the diverse world in which we live. His is a different notion of economicrhetoric than either McCloskey or Aune: it is one that replaces a neo-Aristotelian modelwith a cartographic framework of rhetorical distribution (see Chaput 2010; Edbauer 2005).More than linguistic pragmatism, economic rhetoric, so conceived, is a problem of orderand arrangement, or taxis, embedded into our sense of selves and our embodied actions(see Hanan 2013; Stormer 2004).

For us, Greene’s Foucauldian inflected critical agenda comes closest to theframework needed to approach economic rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Greene’s

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(2004) project attempts to offer an ‘escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as amodel of political communication’ (p. 189) by positioning biopolitics as the object domainof economic rhetoric and its ordering power. This alternative model has not been withoutits critics, most of whom argue that the turn toward biopolitics fails to identify a preciseinstrument for economic rhetoric. For these theorists, his definition of rhetoric as thesurplus constitutive of all value production begs the question of how discursive praxis ismobilized and governed in modern societies. By articulating rhetoric and capitalism to thesame biopolitical plane, Greene’s position can be read as suggesting that democraticagency now operates on autopilot and therefore empties rhetoric of its critical meditationin the very uneven results of neoliberalism (Cloud et al. 2006). We do not share thisconcern, believing that Foucault’s methodology does provide a mechanism for trackingrhetorical power through decentered and diverse institutional and embodied sites – aperspective made clear in Greene’s (1998, 1999, 2009) earlier and later projects thatformulate economic rhetoric in terms of a governing apparatus. In fact, we defend thisposition and deepen its proposition by distinguishing between an apparatus as atechnology of public persuasion that orders and arranges value centripetally and adispositif as a technology of public persuasion that governs value centrifugally.5

To continue refining Greene’s project, we develop a more detailed conversationbetween rhetoric and Foucault’s later scholarship on neoliberal governmentality. Attend-ing to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France that address the dual problematics ofliberalism and biopolitics, we argue that his conception of political economy makes roomfor a vision of economic rhetoric that is a tool for negotiating power both deliberativelyand constitutively or, in Dilip Gaonkar’s (1993) words, simultaneously hermeneutic andproductive. This double articulation stems from the paradoxical role of natural order ineconomic thinking. According to Foucault, contemporary political economy requires afoundational order for its efficient maintenance; if that order is not in place, it must becreated by mechanisms of power that work through institutions (military, legislative, andpolice apparatuses, for instance) as well as populations (freely chosen, everyday activitiessuch as club formations, professional education, or individual comportment). Thus, usinghis conception of biopolitics, we maintain that just as the state must constitute thecompetitive terrain for market efficiency, rhetoric – in the pervasive sense theorized byGreene – constitutes and organizes the public into appropriate neoliberal citizens.

Our essay begins with an overview of Foucault’s reception in rhetorical theory andfollows this exposition with an analysis of how his later work not only binds biopoliticswith the political economic evolution of liberalism but also links biopolitics to rhetoricthrough the organizing power of the dispositif. We then demonstrate this premisethrough a short case study of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s notion offreakonomics (an ongoing endeavor that includes two best-selling books, a website, amovie, a blog, radio programs, and podcasts), suggesting that this project operates as arhetorical dispositif calibrated to the neoliberal political rationality it helps create. Weconclude by gesturing toward a rhetoric of the common as a substitute for the dispositifof freakonomics.

Foucault, Rhetoric, and Materiality

Although Foucault always identified as a materialist insofar as, echoing Althusser, heunderstood discourse as one of many gradations of materiality, his work has been

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interpreted within a rhetorical tradition that views reality as stable and language as itsrepresentative.6 The goal for such a tradition is to match language with reality. Thus,among rhetoricians, Foucault is primarily viewed as a discourse theorist who undergirdsthe reorientation of rhetoric toward a critical method of assessing power relations. Forexample, two early essays on Foucault’s contribution to rhetorical theory – Carole Blair andMartha Cooper’s (1987) ‘The Humanist Turn in Foucault’s Rhetoric of Inquiry’ and RaymieMcKerrow’s (1989) ‘Critical Rhetoric’ – see Foucault through a discursive lens. Thesedisciplinary appropriations limit rhetoric to its hermeneutic role: they use Foucault tocritique power from a position inside those power relations and therefore fail to provide aspace for exploring rhetoric’s productive role (Biesecker 1992; Ono & Sloop 1992). Thiscritical approach, while useful to rhetoricians compelled by Foucault, tends to ignore thecentrality of historical contextualization and extra-discursive power relations implicit in hiswork (Greene 1998, 1999, 2009). No doubt, Foucault emphasized the micropolitics ofpower in its various manifestations; yet, to decouple his methodology from a materialistperspective that interrogates power as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements andtechnologies is to borrow a limited conception of his contributions for narrowly definedrhetorical implications.

For those who have had the benefit of working through Foucault’s recentlytranslated lectures at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1979, another relationshipamong Foucault, rhetoric, and materiality emerges, one intimately connected to a ‘politicalrationality’ that Foucault calls liberalism.7 Foucault’s last lecture of the 1975–1976 course,collected as Society Must Be Defended (2003), first introduced this methodologicalperspective under the category of biopower. After a yearlong sabbatical, he returned towhat was at first a merely provocative take on contemporary politics with a fullydeveloped notion of biopower as the sociocultural operations of political economy. Duringtwo consecutive academic years (1977–1978 and 1978–1979), he elaborated on thistheory. Security, Territory, Population (2007) explores Foucault’s concept of security as acrucial dispositif of biopower while The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) traces biopower throughthe emergence of liberal political economy and its evolution into neoliberalism. Theselectures arrive at a broader framework for understanding the irreducibly contingentgovernmental structure of liberalism as well as its ontological relationship to rhetoric.8

Read as a group, they suggest a relationship between rhetoric and economics that hingeson the state, the dispositif of security, and the problematic of ordering value withindifferent political rationalities of economic liberalism.9 Ultimately, these lectures offertwo important insights into the rhetoric of economics. First, they provide an implicit theoryof rhetoric that unifies both its constitutive and deliberative functions, and, second, theylink that implied notion of rhetoric to economics vis-à-vis his strategic conception ofdispositif.

In the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault introduces hisconcept of security as a dispositif for producing and intervening in the institutional anddiscursive field that he labels biopower. ‘Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies,’he proposes that ‘the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to theliving man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species’ (2003, p. 242).Working on behalf of biopower rather than disciplinary power, security has a uniqueobject of concern that centers on the sociological problematic of populations.10 ForFoucault, disciplinary power and biopower develop in distinct historical epochs and servedifferent functions; they are not, however, mutually exclusive: the ‘new technique does not

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simply do away with the disciplinary technique’ (2003, p. 242). Instead, they arecomplementary. ‘After a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode,’Foucault explains that there is ‘a second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, ifyou like, massifying’ (2003, p. 243). Discipline (the mechanism of disciplinary power)produces and taxonomizes individuals according to a predetermined value structure, andthen security (the mechanism of biopower) organizes those differently valued individualsinto populations of independent individuals acting according to their own free will.

In Security, Territory, Population (2007), Foucault continues to tease out therelationship between discipline and security, taking greater pains to differentiate betweenthese two technologies of power. Disciplinary power acts like a centrifugal force to policenormalization while biopower functions as a centripetal force that allows the abnormal toproliferate. Security, the primary dispositif of biopower, organizes difference so as tobalance its negative consequences with its positive ones. Whereas discipline attemptsto enclose an environment and ‘let nothing escape,’ security fuels alterity. As Foucault(2007) says, ‘new elements are constantly being integrated: production, psychology,behavior, the ways of doing things of producers, buyers, consumers, importers, andexporters, and the world market’ (p. 45). The power of security lies in its capacity to makepopulations visible – what Greene (1998) calls a ‘publicity effect’ – so that they can, in turn,be institutionally acted upon through various governmental rationalities. Securityrecognizes and accepts difference even as it makes those differences ‘function in relationto each other’ (2007, p. 47). Normal, within the logic of discipline, serves to replicate aprecise target and to subjugate anything outside that target while normal, within the logicof security, is a statistical average that allows society to function properly – adequateemployment numbers, strong literacy figures, and low foreclosure rates, to name only afew of its indices. Security thus works by presuming a socially constituted equilibrium (anatural order) that engages ‘reality in such a way that this response cancels out the realityto which it responds – nullifies it, or limits, checks, or regulates it’ (2007, p. 47). Ifemployment numbers drop below an acceptable level, jobs must be created; the specificsof those jobs or the particularities of the unemployed are not relevant. Indifferent to theindividual, the object of security is the statistical aggregate – countering unemploymentnumbers with employment numbers.

Security addresses ontologically contingent modes of human behavior througheconomic calculation and practical reasoning by recognizing that normative value doesnot exist as a point on a grid but within myriad power relationships. Foucault (1980) callsthis a dual process of ‘functional overdetermination’ and ‘strategic elaboration’ (p. 195). AsFoucault (2007) details:

in the apparatus of security, as I have presented it, what is involved is precisely not takingeither the point of view of what is prevented or the point of view of what is obligatory,but standing back sufficiently so that one can grasp the point at which things are takingplace, whether or not they are desirable. This means trying to grasp them at the level oftheir nature, or let’s say – this word not having the meaning we now give it – graspingthem at the level of their effective reality. (pp. 46–47)

Because security targets society at the level of an effective reality rather than at thejuridical level of sovereignty or the civic level of society, the modus operandi of such powercan no longer be located in legal prohibition or disciplinary proscription. Instead, thestructure of power is aligned with an irreducibly fragmentary problematic that Lawrence

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Grossberg (2010a, 2010b, p. 104) has recently identified as commensuration: ‘theproblematic of measuring or comparing value’. In short, security negotiates life activitiesthrough calculations, statistics, and algorithms pegged to an efficient market. Howevermuch this efficient marketplace functions as a reality, or reality effect to use Foucault’slexicon, it requires security to govern populations through perpetual interventions, so thatindividual freedom can flourish. The point we wish to emphasize is that what Foucaultcalls security is an organizing power with significant overlap in both the instrumental andthe constitutive rhetorical traditions.

Foucault’s problematization of security as an ongoing of act of calculating, ordering,and stabilizing difference implicitly defines the marketplace as rhetorically constituted – aninstrument for creating and governing reality. Indeed, the link Foucault creates betweenrhetoric and economics has been highlighted explicitly in Giorgio Agamben’s recent study,The Kingdom and the Glory. According to Agamben, Foucault’s attempt to locate biopowerwithin the liberal marketplace has its roots in the Ciceronian rhetorical canon of taxis orarrangement. Etymologically, the economy’s origins can be traced back to the Greekconcept of oikonomia, or the monarchial sphere of household management, but, he says,it was the Roman Christians who were the first to articulate the economy as an abstractsystem of power in the doctrinal form of the Holy Trinity. Theologians such as Saint Justinand Tatian the Assyrian drew theoretical resources from the rhetorical tradition toconceptualize the Holy Trinity as an immanent form of order that mediates between beingand praxis. The tripartite relationship among The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit,understood as a singularity able to produce order out of irreducible ontological difference,‘takes place by means of an economic-rhetorical paradigm’ (Agamben 2011, p. 30).Agamben goes on to argue that modern governing techniques replace political theologywith economic theology (the market) and that the linchpin of these two paradigms is therhetorical mechanism of taxis. Through recourse to rhetoric and its ordering function,neither the Trinity nor the modern marketplace is viewed as a heterogeneous substance;rather, each is ‘the articulation – at every turn administrative-managerial or pragmatic-rhetorical – of a single reality. In other words, the heterogeneity does not concern beingand ontology, but rather action and praxis’ (Agamben 2011, p. 41).

In Agamben’s conception, it is precisely the ‘rhetoric of economics’ that constitutes asingular order from its multiple parts just as it is economic rhetoric that then organizesother heterogeneous elements according to the rhythm of that order.11 Consequently,Agamben argues that by ‘removing God from the world, [modern economic thought] hasnot only failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other thanto lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion’ (p. 287). As a dispositif ofsecurity, the ordering function of economic rhetoric cannot be decoupled from sovereignpower, disciplinary power, and biopower. By forging identity through value commensura-tion, security materializes rhetorically only ‘as a collateral effect, in an area in which generaland particular, positive and negative, calculation and unexpected events tend to overlap’(p. 142). Read through Agamben’s archeological lens, security functions rhetorically tostabilize society by organizing statistical data in relation to the rhetorically constitutedreality of an ordered economy. The free market has an internal ordering mechanism, buteffort is required, in the strategic form of security, to regulate life activities in theimmanent context of biopower.

Foucault (2007) implies this ‘doubly articulated’ understanding of economic rhetoricin his 1977 lectures, but it is not until the following year’s lectures that he offers a detailed

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analysis of the political rationalities of liberal sovereignty, from the classical to theneoliberal, that serve as the constitutive barometer for organizing political, economic, andsocial phenomena. As he sees it, liberalism breaks from previous political rationalitiespredicated on the ‘order of things,’ precisely in its discovery of political economy as a self-regulatory mode of social organization. Sovereignty, prior to this historical moment, wasstructured around a ‘disciplinary’ paradigm that sought to enclose and capture increas-ingly diffuse and porous spaces of power. With liberalism, however, political economyemerges as a new ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 2008, p. 20) that reflects the open andexpansive aims of security. Foucault (2008) explains that:

political economy does not discover natural rights that exist prior to the exercise ofgovernmentality; it discovers a certain naturalness specific to the practices of govern-ment itself.… The notion of nature will thus be transformed with the appearance ofpolitical economy. For political economy, nature is not an original and reserved region onwhich the exercise of power should not impinge, on pain of being illegitimate. Nature issomething that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality. (pp. 14–15)

For Foucault, it is the artificially constituted ‘naturalness’ of political economy that informsthe governmental objectives of liberalism and makes possible the biopolitical caesurabetween sacred human life and profane animal life (what Agamben [1995] calls ‘bare life’).This political rationality must include and embrace difference and multiplicity at the sametime that it renders new populations visible from within the representational structure ofeconomic exchange. The market that emerges from this Scottish enlightenment thinkingis not ontologically given but a power that forges reality through continuous sociopoliticaland economic vigilance.

According to Foucault’s (2008) genealogy, the constant development of such apolitical rationality produces a new reality effect: by the late twentieth century,governmentality becomes predominantly ordered by the particular political economiccalculus of neoliberalism. As a political rationality that embraces market transcendenceeven more so than classical liberalism, neoliberalism advocates rethinking the rhetoricalrelationship between biopower and security. Whereas classical liberalism treats the marketas ‘a mechanical or natural process that one can separate out [from government]’ (Foucault2008, p. 163), neoliberalism expands the market through a more organic process inwhich it becomes difficult to distinguish among political, economic, and cultural spheres.As Michael Kaplan (2013) explains, neoliberalism ‘is the performative self-objectification ofthe market economy in which prices no longer need to refer to – or signify – any‘underlying’ market dynamics but rather function by serving as objects of institutionalanalysis, public controversy, and policy decisions’ (pp. 139–140). Whereas liberalism treatssecurity as a technology of power located at the dialectical intersection of homo juridicusand homo oeconomicus, neoliberalism structures sociopolitical policy in accordance with,rather than in, ‘compensation for the effects of economic processes’ (Foucault 2008,p. 142). In short, neoliberalism becomes an overarching mechanism that encompasses alllife activities.

Rhetoric, Dispositif, and American Neoliberalism

Although Foucault never discusses rhetoric in this genealogy, his treatment ofneoliberalism and its dispositif of security offers a useful framework for intervening into

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the rhetoric of economics debate. Foucault articulates both a subject of power free tomake autonomous decisions and a form of power, one he calls security, that tracks andorganizes those choices according to the needs of neoliberalism, enabling a framework forconceptualizing rhetoric instrumentally without falling into a definition of power asoppressive and without relying on a dichotomy between the discursive and the material.This understanding of power works hand-in-hand with Ronald Walter Greene’s (1998) callto study rhetoric ‘as a mode of publicity’ (p. 31). Greene’s modality of publicity treatsrhetoric ‘as a technology that distributes different elements onto a governing apparatus inorder that a series of judgments might be made about the act of government’ (p. 32). Forus, these judgments – ones that assess the biopolitical problematic of how security links tovalue commensuration within the broader political rationality of neoliberalism – emphas-ize rhetoric as an organizing principle that works through networks of decenteredrelationships. Echoing Greene’s (2009) recent scholarship, we call this doubly articulatedapproach a rhetorical dispositif and argue that it can be used to map the strategicmodalities of neoliberal power.

Foucault’s description of the dispositif as a term for understanding the ongoingproduction of biopower significantly overlaps with traditional understandings of rhetoric.The phrase itself appears relatively late in his work and, as Agamben (2009) notes, doesnot get its first definition from Foucault until 1975 in an interview with the psychoanalyticjournal Ornicar. In this interview, translated into English as ‘The Confession of the Flesh,’Foucault (1980) defines the dispositif in the following manner:

What I try to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensembleconsisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws,administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropicpropositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of theapparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established betweenthese elements. Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely thenature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. […]whether discursive or non-discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position andmodifications of function which can also vary very widely. Thirdly, I understand by theterm ‘apparatus’ a sort of – shall we say – formation which has as its major function at agiven historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. (pp. 194–195)

There are several observations worth noting in this definition that make the dispositif aninherently rhetorical problematic. The first is the contingent character of the dispositif as aheterogeneous ensemble of divergent practices. Institutional as well as discursive productsare only nodal points within a larger political rationality, which organizes the relationshipsamong these different elements. Second, the goal of the critic, according to this model, isto demonstrate the connectivity among these various components, an approach thatresonates with both Grossberg’s (2010a, 2010b) idea of value commensuration andGreene’s (1998) desire for rhetorical publicity. Finally of note, from a rhetorical perspective,is the strategic function of the dispositif. The dispositif emerges in response to a need andoffers a pragmatic approach for engaging with questions of power and order, implicitlygrounding itself in one of rhetoric’s foundational concepts.12

Foucault’s concept of power as outlined above offers a sound frame for rhetoricalinquiry, but we would like to further differentiate dispositif from apparatus as its privilegedstructural form. Although dispositif and apparatus are often translated into English as

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though they were synonymous, a recent essay by Jeffrey Bussolini (2010) titled ‘What isa Dispostive’ makes a compelling case that ‘there are important philosophical andhistorical insights to be gained in treating the usage and specificity of the concepts’separately (p. 86). Bussolini contends that apparatus and dispositif have two different gridsof intelligibility when viewed etymologically. In Italian one connects to the root wordappareil and the other dispositiv. Appareil translates as machine, suggesting that theapparatus describes an enclosed and unified power structure (such as the centripetalpanopticon); conversely, dispositiv signifies a less unified and more networked structure(such as the centrifugal homo oeconomicus). We believe Foucault’s emphasis on security asan organizing technology of biopower that is constantly expanding corresponds withBussolini’s interpretation of the dispositif as an abstract network of power rather than themore clearly determined space of apparatus. Indeed, American neoliberalism – because ofits long history, differing approaches, and deep-seated imbrication into what Foucault(1986) calls the ‘care of the self’ or one’s everyday activities and behaviors – clearlyexemplifies the multiplying aspect of the dispositif.

In a brief interlude from his more Eurocentric genealogy, Birth of Biopolitics:Foucault (2008) discusses American neoliberalism, which he believes represents anidealized version of this political rationality. American neoliberalism differs from theGerman and French varieties for Foucault in three significant ways. The USA, he says, wasforged in liberalism (its independence from England and its Constitution created a liberalstate); it maintained those ideals throughout its history, and it constituted the nonliberal as‘threatening’ (pp. 217–218). Consequently, there exists in the USA a prevalent liberalimagination that Foucault says is ‘a sort of utopian focus which is always being revived’(p. 219).13 He devotes an entire lecture to examining Gary Becker’s human capital theoryas one such revision. One that, he says, enables American neoliberalism ‘to applyeconomic analyses to completely new fields and domains’ (p. 227). Just as markets are notinnately competitive and thus need state intervention in order to ensure free competition,individuals are not innately tuned to the logic of neoliberal subjectivity. Individuals, that is,require strategic biopolitical interventions in order that they may be organized andinterpellated as ‘free’ neoliberal subjects and Chicago School economists, particularly thebehavioral economists, are crucial to the economic work of accomplishing this task.

With the strategic convergence of liberal economists, social theorists, and conser-vative businessmen at the University of the Chicago emerged a paradigm of thoughtrenowned for its opposition to economic planning (van Horn & Mirowski 2009). Contraryto many economists who locate Frank Knight as the father of this school of thought, aswell as Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski (2009) who understand Friedrich Hayek as theintellectual orchestrator of Chicago School neoliberalism, Foucault, whose focus lies in theorganizing power aligned with neoliberalism, positions Gary Becker as its decisive thinker.What Becker offered was an expansive theory of human capital that opened up an entirefield of market possibilities for self-regulation and self-improvement. By presuming that allhuman decisions have economic implications, Becker conceptualizes individual subjectiv-ity as an economy of power, or homo oeconomicus, ‘which will act on the environment andsystematically modify its variables’ (Foucault 2008, p. 270).14 With Becker, economicscomes to explain everything from how to choose a mate to whether a particular individualwill or will not break the rule of law. Of primary interest to Foucault is the new logic ofgovernance in Becker’s theory of human capital that replaces the negative order ofdisciplinary power with a biopolitical power that positively orders human activities by

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encouraging subjects to conceptualize all strategic decision-making in terms of economicvalue. It is with this insight that we approach the rhetorical dispositif of freakonomics. Forus, the popular intervention of freakonomics is one among many rhetorical dispositifs thatrationalize neoliberal sovereignty by deterritorializing and then reterritorializing a multipli-city of mundane social phenomena within an immanent biopolitical terrain. Representingthe utopian call of the American marketplace, the rhetorical dispositif of freakonomicsworks through dual modalities; it constitutes citizens in accordance with the market orderat the same time that it governs freely chosen, heterogeneous life activities according tothe algorithms of contemporary capitalism. The next section illustrates this point byexploring how freakonomics, as a dispositif working on behalf of the political rationality ofneoliberalism, strategically reimagines deviant subjects and mundane objects.

The Dispositif of Freakonomics and Its Rhetorical Work

Not surprisingly, the political rationality of neoliberalism and the dispositif offreakonomics have the same roots in the Chicago School of economics. If Becker was atthe forefront of the explosion of neoliberal economics into everyday activities – what BenFine and Dimitris Milonakis (2009) call economics imperialism – this movement comes toits full maturation with the watershed publication of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J.Dubner’s (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.15

Levitt, another Chicago School economist, takes Becker’s approach of studying the socialfrom the perspective of marginalist economics and makes it a sensation within popularculture. He accomplishes this through a slight recalibration, whereas Becker’s approachtreats the social as if it were akin ‘to perfectly working markets’ Levitt analyzes the social‘as the response to market imperfections’ (Fine & Milonakis 2009, p. 12). Although bothmethods understand the subject as capable of acting according to economic decision-making, the new form of freakonomics has the additional benefit of further absorbingother disciplinary subjects and knowledges into its field of power. Predictably, Levitt’s twopopular books – Freakonomics (2005) and SuperFreakonomics (2009) – spawned a range ofother material from podcasts and a documentary to handbooks, lectures, and hands-onexperiments that further expand its functional range. As a rhetorical dispositif, the field offreakonomics organizes and values a multiplicity of cultural forms according to theimpersonal and de-humanizing economic algorithms of neoliberalism. It does not makenormative judgments as much as it rationalizes and distributes power. In other words, thefield of freakonomics has less to tell us about its subject matter – breathtakingly sweepingin its scope and including such things as crack gangs, sumo wrestlers, prostitutes,schoolteachers, consumer production, and individual fashion, to only hint at its range ofsubjects – than it does about how a neoliberal political rationality incorporates,accommodates, and redistributes power within its myriad objects of study.

To say that freakonomics is a rhetorical dispositif is to suggest that its modality ofpower organizes relationships among diverse elements. With little capacity to act on theelements under investigation, freakonomics derives its power through the surprisinganalytic relationships it forges. Accordingly, Levitt claims that freakonomics has nounifying theme. Although he considered focusing on the single topic of appliedmicroeconomics, he settled on ‘freakonomics’ which ‘employs the best analytical toolsthat economics can offer, but allows us to follow whatever freakish curiosities may occurto us … no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach’ (2005, p. 13). The book’s

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bonus material says that the goal of this nontheme is to instruct readers in ‘how to look atthe world like an economist’ (2005, p. 263). Stated differently, freakonomics teaches itsaudience how to quantify culture (2005, p. 231). The book and its supplementary materialspopularize economics by showing their broad applicability and not by explaining theirtraditional terrain and foundational concepts. The material force of the book is tohabituate readers through repetitive methodological pathways that repeatedly arrive atneoliberal value commensurations. For instance, one of the most controversial claims ofthe book is that Roe v. Wade contributed to reduced crime rates. Such a claim is notadvocating abortions, as some of its critics contend, nor is it suggesting a eugenicsprogram as a means of dealing with crime. Instead, it simply brings together birth rates,abortion rates, and crime rates to explain a particular behavior (abortion) through themarketplace of free choice. Rather than deliberating about how to intervene in aneconomy with fewer opportunities for skilled and unskilled labor, individuals negotiatetheir own choices and abortion, like crime, is one such vehicle. The dispositif offreakonomics cuts to the rhetorical chase – abortions are cheaper than prisons for dealingwith surplus populations – and it does so without any kind of moral assessment.

For Levitt, there is little doubt that economic subjects act both rationally andirrationally; however, that dichotomy does not seem to matter as deviant behavior, onceexplored, can nevertheless be accounted for by the market. The central point offreakonomics is that obvious, self-interested choice theory exists only superficially whilethe market order penetrates more deeply into life experiences. The repeated metaphor ofcutting into the surface for truths that lie underneath exemplifies the natural, though oftenhidden, market order that unifies the freakonomics project. In fact, the book coverannounces this metaphor through its visual representation of an apple skin that contains,once one slices into the flesh below, the fruit of an orange. Thus, the cover imageencapsulates the book’s fundamental project: ‘stripping a layer or two from the surface ofmodern life and seeing what is happening underneath’ (Levitt 2005, p. 11). It is thisarcheological digging that allows Levitt to link decreased crime rates with legalizedabortions, to compare crack dealers with McDonald’s franchises, and to argue that both theKlu Klux Klan and real estate agents acquire power through information asymmetries. Theseintriguing comparisons and their supporting data predominantly serve to bolster the ideathat all social phenomena accord with the market, whether legally sanctioned or not. Thepolitical, economic, and rhetorical force in each instance remains the same – to seekadvantage within a competitive terrain – even though the cases might appear dramaticallydifferent. In its methodological choice as well as its objects of study, freakonomics distancesitself from the hallowed grounds of its origins in the Chicago School.

Representing itself as a decidedly new way of looking at the world, freakonomicsbreaks from the field of behavioral economics forged at the Chicago School as well as theChicago School itself. The fault lines of this break lie in the difference between perfectchoice theory that encourages specific behaviors (relying on a model of disciplinarypower) and neoliberal explanations that draw relationships among divergent behaviorsusing the dispositif as its structural model. Levitt (2005) asserts repeatedly that he doesn’t‘know very much about the field of economics’ (p. xxiv). What he seems to mean is that hehas no privileged access to the future success of economic choices. Even as he is housedwithin the powerful Chicago School as the director of the Becker Center on Chicago PriceTheory, Levitt disavows this institutional allegiance. Indeed, Levitt’s (2005) coauthordescribes him in opposition to the Chicago School: ‘Chicago is about theory, deep thinking

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and big ideas, while he is about empiricism, clever thinking and ‘cute’ but ultimatelyinsubstantial ideas’ (p. 227). He further ruptures this intellectual filiation by focusing onneither the prohibition nor the prescription of specific behavior but simply on the‘freakish’ and the ‘natural’ – what Foucault calls the ‘effective reality’ (2007, p. 47). Thismove redoubles in Levitt’s (2005) attack on experts as those who manipulate us by using‘their information advantage to serve their own agenda’ (p. 12). Rather than groundingitself in specific self-serving disciplinary claims, the emphasis of the entire freakonomicsproject is on what he simply calls ‘thinking sensibly’ (2005, p. 209). Such a focus reflects abroader neoliberal political rationality, which unifies widely diverse practices within anartificially constituted but presumably ‘natural’ order. As consumers of these texts, wecome to not only believe something but also become something: human capital adaptedto ‘a general style of thought, analysis, and imagination’ (Foucault 2008, p. 219). Therhetorical dispositif constitutes and organizes subjects without ever telling them how toenact their subjectivity.

With no particular object of study, the rhetorical dispositif of freakonomics hasendless opportunities to rationalize a multiplicity of profane social relationships inaccordance with the sacred market logic of neoliberalism. This, as Agamben (2009)contends, is the primary task of any rhetorical dispositif (see Fuggle 2009). As Levitt (2005)says, if ‘the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter,then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach’ (p. 13). Responding to thosewho criticize its ability to explain everything, SuperFreakonomics (2009) clarifies that theauthors were ‘sure reasonable people would view such a phrase as intentional hyperbole’(p. xiv). What they do not say is that such critics mistake freakonomics for a disciplinarypower which explains particular phenomena while freakonomics actually operatesthrough a radically open rhetorical dispositif that calculates relationships among apotentially infinite range of phenomena. In other words, the critics align freakonomicswith Foucault’s (1980) definition of power as a ‘cluster of relations’ rather than with hisdefinition of a dispositif as ‘a grid of analysis which makes possible an analytic of relationsof power’ (p. 199). Like the logic of security, a dispositif does not use power to distinguishthe normal from the abnormal but constructs a multidimensional diagram of both forothers to use as they see fit. As coinvestigators, the individuals invited into the field offreakonomics assume the enlightenment identity of impartial observer. Indeed, Levitt(2005) instructs the reader to ‘consider yourself, then, in the company of a third person …eager to explore the objective merits of interesting cases’ (p. 14). In this framework,the limits to objective merits and the boundaries of particular cases disappear into thebackground as the connections among disparate people and their activities assumethe foreground. Publics constituted through freakonomics pin their hopes on marketrationality generally and not on any specific behavior in particular.

As a rhetorical dispositif, freakonomics reinvents the field of economic inquiry inaccordance with a broader neoliberal political rationality that incorporates, calculates, andconnects its myriad elements. Just as the Romans assembled a single Christian economythrough the rhetorical concept of taxis, so too Levitt presents economic thinking as acoherent whole made up of many divergent parts. For instance, SuperFreakonomics (2009)describes microeconomist Keith Chen as a researcher who ‘after a brief infatuation withMarxism … made an about-face and took up economics’ (p. 212). In this structural frame,Marxism (a brand of economic thinking) is opposed to economics proper. Marxism,however, is not critiqued by attacking its foundational principles or pointing out its

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erroneous conclusions, which disciplinary power might do. On the contrary, intellectualsand others are allowed to practice (or not practice) Marxism or any other form ofeconomic thinking. Rather than extinguishing difference, neoliberalism prevails as aunified whole by admitting alternative economic explanations and enabling freedom ofchoice. In this way, it transforms Marxism from a commentary on economic reality into areality effect produced through market openness. As opposed to disputing the value ofMarxism and other deviant behaviors, freakonomics simply manages the various relation-ships among them. This rhetorical force stems from its desire to calculate bothcommensuration and noncommensuration. Levitt (2005) emphasizes that freakonomics‘is above all a science of measurement. It comprises an extraordinarily powerful andflexible set of tools that can reliably assess a thicket of information’ (pp. 11–12). In the end,freakonomics is not an economic platform designed for predictive purposes; it is arationalizing and quantifying dispositif designed to amass and distribute rhetorical powerthrough its sheer explanatory function.

Freakonomics illustrates how the primary aim of a rhetorical dispositif is to attuneitself to mass calculations and technical modulations, rather than democratic politicaldeliberation. Stated differently, freakonomics is an economic rhetoric that remainsapolitical to the extent that it addresses political antagonisms, individual differences,and particular experiences through calculations, statistics, and averages. Thus, Levittsidesteps the rhetorical contingency of all value commensuration through his definition ofeconomics as a numerical measurement and organization of lived experience. Levitt (2005)laments that:

although economists are trained to be cold-blooded enough to sit around and calmlydiscuss the trade-offs involved in global catastrophe, the rest of us are a bit moreexcitable. And most people respond to uncertainly with more emotion – fear, blame,paralysis – than might be advisable. (p. 169)

From this perspective, Levitt (2009) praises Robert McNamara as a rare economic-orientedpolitician who ‘tended to make decisions based on statistical analysis rather than emotionor political considerations’ (p. 209). Unstated in this celebration of McNamara are the‘collateral effects’ of US economic policy that Agamben (1995) calls bare life, which, humanand otherwise, were constitutively excluded from his ‘rational’ management of theVietnam War. Instead, Levitt focuses on the former Secretary of Defense’s role in helpingFord implement car seatbelts. Freakonomics prefers to collect and organize data (eachseatbelt costs $25, and each life saved yields approximately $30,000, making it an efficientproduct). It avoids dredging through explicitly political terrains as such disputes lie on thesurface of reality whereas its focus is on the hidden ordering mechanism of economics.

Levitt’s argument about cheating teachers, which resulted in the dismissal of severalinstructors, similarly tracks economic reality effects without engaging in the normativedisputes of its examples. As Levitt summarizes the case, economists were able to detectsuspicious consecutive correct answers at the end of standardized tests (where severalblanks might exist) by applying a computer algorithm to student scores. From these data,they correctly deduced that teachers filled in answers to improve student results. ArneDuncan, CEO of the Chicago public schools, contacted the authors of this study whohelped him implement additional tests to identify cheating teachers in his schools. In thisframework, cheating teachers are not ‘bad’ as much as they are obstacles to marketcompetition. Levitt praises Duncan’s efforts for their technical validity – they demonstrate

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sound economic thinking oriented toward free market practices – and not for any politicalor social motivation. Indeed, Levitt does not have a stake in educational testing; he nevermakes an explicit argument about cheating; and he never addresses the larger context ofpublic education. His investment, rather, is in publicizing neoliberal subjectivity and inrevealing the ordering mechanism of the marketplace throughout every aspect of humanactivity. Without ever instructing its audience toward specific behaviors, freakonomicsdemonstrates, case after case, how the market solves social problems and is thus the bestindicator for the allocation of scarce resources.

Such a conclusion works from the neoclassical presumption that human beings areautonomous self-interested individuals who respond to economic incentives. It does so byaddressing and, indeed, constituting its readers within the neoliberal milieu. That is to saythat the ideology of neoclassical economics supports the political rationality ofneoliberalism. This relationship holds together even when individual choice does notaccord with economic models because, as we have explained and freakonomics hasconcretely illustrated, the rhetorical power of the dispositif operates on all reality effects,even those that appear anomalous and deviant. It is completely consistent with thismodality of power that Levitt’s own definition of incentive is neither coherent nor rational.In one place Levitt (2005) says ‘an incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny objectwith astonishing power to change a situation’ (p. 16). In another place, ‘an incentive issimply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing’(Levitt 2005, p. 17). Responding to incentives, Levitt claims, ‘is also known as rationalbehavior, which is what economics is all about’ (2009, p. 122). This discussion of incentivesas the mechanism by which rationality emerges suggests one stable point: disciplinarypower is never far behind biopower. The supposedly natural force of the invisible handthat directs self-interested individuals offers little more than a shorthand reference for ahistorically forged neoliberalism and its interpellated subjects. And, as Philip Mirowski(2013) recently asserted, neoliberalism permeates everyday life not because of officialChicago School policies or Mont Pèlerin Society platforms; on the contrary, ‘the tenacity ofneoliberal doctrines that might have otherwise been refuted,’ he says, ‘has to be rooted inthe extent to which a kind of “folk” or “everyday” neoliberalism has sunk so deeply into thecultural unconscious’ (p. 89). So deeply has the folk science of freakonomics sunk that weno longer see its contingency and instead spend our time lodging critiques against ahodgepodge of contradictory neoclassical assertions.

Conclusion: Rhetoric, Humanomics, and the Commons

Although our extended sojourn through the rhetorical dispositif of freakonomicsroots everyday life within the political rationality neoliberalism, there is no reason that thisanalytic of power be directed toward only economic phenomena. As Agamben (2009)illustrates in his book What is an Apparatus?, dispositif can be defined as ‘anything that hasin some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or securethe gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings’ (p. 14). As a technologyof public persuasion that organizes power strategically and centrifugally, from within theconstitutive context of divergent rationalities of government, rhetorical dispositifs are asheterogeneous as the overdetermined networks that comprise modern biopower. Asscholars of economic rhetoric what we find so pernicious about the dispositif offreakonomics is the way it deploys economic rationality to curtail the foundational

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rhetoricity inherent in all economic thought. By encouraging subjects to value all forms oflife in accordance with a broader neoliberal political rationality, freakonomics foreclosesthe opportunity to conceptualize social wealth outside utilitarian calculus and instrumentalreason. It is for this reason that we see the need to invent new political rationalities anddispositifs that go beyond what Jodi Dean (2008) calls the neoliberal fantasy. To beginthinking in such a direction, we return the conversation to its origins in McCloskey’s work.

In an interview with National Review about her book Bourgeois Dignity, the secondinstallation in what will be a four-volume series linking the revaluation of work to theinnovation and growth of capitalism, Deirdre McCloskey positions rhetoric as a humanistproject opposed to the dispositif of freakonomics. McCloskey (2010c, p. 9) suggests that‘we need more humanomics, not more freakonomics’. Interested in the relationshipbetween rhetoric and economics, McCloskey is dismayed by the reduction of economicsto individual behavior at the same time that it excludes an individual’s linguistic behavior,which she says accounts for a significant amount of economic production. McCloskeyargues that this economic project – one popularized as freakonomics – relies not onlanguage as persuasion but on language as communication. In freakonomics, language ismerely an algorithmic calculation, devoid of its humanistic qualifications. McCloskey doesnot value freakonomics because, as she (2010b) says elsewhere, ‘formal maximum-utilityeconomics cannot explain the sweet talk’ (p. 2) of rhetorical persuasion.

McCloskey (2010b) advocates what she calls ‘humanomics’ or ‘an economics andsociology and history that acknowledges humans as speakers of meaning’ (p. 3). Such ahistory, one she is presently pursuing, explores how changes in the social status of thebourgeoisie contributed significantly to the material changes of early modern capitalism.

While it is beyond the scope of this essay to comment on McCloskey’s currentresearch, we do want to borrow from her the desire to push economics toward more ofthis so-named humanomics and away from freakonomics. If humanonomics consists inembracing the social and cultural contingency of all discursive thought and expression,then, along with Hardt and Negri (2000), we advocate a ‘posthumanist humanism’ (p. 91)that can rethink the logic of value commensuration both inside and outside the field ofeconomics proper. Since, as we have illustrated in this essay, the primary expression ofeconomic rhetoric today takes the form of dispositifs, we believe it is time to work towarda new rhetoric of economics project that redefines the order on which value circulatesthrough exchange.

One such possibility that has been the topic of much critical discussion is thecommon. Although subject to various definitions, David Harvey’s (2012) recent Rebel Citiesoffers a nice entry point. Harvey (2012) defines the common ‘as an unstable and malleablesocial relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of itsactually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucialto its life and livelihood’ (p. 73). As we see it, Harvey’s conception of the common operatesas an alternative dispositif of value commensuration – one that is fluid and open in itsembrace of multiplicity and difference but not wedded to the political rationality ofneoliberalism. Whereas neoliberal governmentality encourages all value to be ordered andarranged within a strictly competitive sphere of individual free market practices and theirattendant rights, the common can only be defined through the immanent possibilities ofcollective power within a shared environment. In this sense, the common ‘is, in effect, asocial practice of commoning’ (p. 73). Not a unified system of exchange and accumulation,such as capitalism, the common offers an alternative political rationality of value

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commensuration that refracts irreducibly heterogeneous values back upon neoliberalsovereignty. In other words, the common embraces the rhetoricity of liberalism by takingseriously its belief that ‘the rationality of the governed must serve as the regulatingprinciple for the rationality of government’ (Foucault 2008, p. 312).

In short, we believe that when approached from the Foucauldian perspective thatwe have outlined in this essay, the rhetoric of economics conversation can be broadenedin a number of new directions. Foucault’s theorization of security and liberalism offers adifferent way of conceptualizing the economy’s inherent rhetoricity and thus enables us tostudy regimes of value commensuration that constitute and challenge today’s neoliberalorder. While such a project, we have argued, will need to account for both theinstrumental and constitutive dimensions of rhetorical praxis, we encourage rethinkingdiscourse, economics, and power along more commoning grounds and against suchreductive and isolating ones as found in the dispositif of freakonomics. From aFoucauldian perspective, we reject the stability of freakonomics’ claim to rationality andencourage alternative ways of ordering and governing the social.

NOTES

1. On POROI, see John S. Nelson and Allan Megill’s (1986) essay ‘Rhetoric of Inquiry: Projectsand Prospects.’

2. For a discussion of constitutive rhetoric, see Maurice Charland (1987) and Greene (1998).While Greene appreciates Charland’s model of rhetorical effectivity, he is suspicious of itsparadoxical positioning of the speaking subject outside of historical and ideologicalinfluence. It is this materialist paradox that Greene, with his emphasis on apparatus,attempts to escape.

3. Aune’s take on Marxism is illustrated in greater detail in his earlier book Rhetoric andMarxism (1994). Without addressing this earlier work explicitly, Aune’s orientation towardMarxism remains consistent in his later project Selling the Free Market (2001).

4. This is true as well of rhetorician Dana Cloud’s (1994, 2001, 2011) work on economics. Infact, she may be the flip side of McCloskey in that she sees capitalism to cause economicdevastation for many while McCloskey views capitalism as the cause of economicprosperity.

5. On the concept of technologies of public persuasion, see Gaonkar and Povinelli (2003).6. Foucault’s early interest in political economy stems, at least in part, from the close

intellectual relationship he shared with his mentor, the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser.For further discussion of Foucault’s relationship to Marxism, see Foucault’s Remarks onMarx (1991), Étienne Balibar’s ‘Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism’ (1992),and Warren Montag’s (1995) ‘The Soul is the Prison of the Body.’

7. Thomas Lemke (2012) defines political rationality as ‘a discursive field in which exercisingpower is “rationalized”’ (p. 86). While, for us, political rationalities and dispositifs arecrucially intertwined, the two are not mutually substitutable with one another as one is arationality and the other is a mode of power distribution.

8. For a discussion of this expanded ontological notion of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellbery(1990), Schiappa (2001), and Rickert (2013).

9. In tracing this intellectual trajectory, it is important to note that a single lecture onbiopower and governmentality was circulating for over a decade before the full course oflectures was made available in book form. A February 1978 lecture was transcribed and

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translated into Italian. It was then translated into English as ‘Governmentality’ and

included in Graham Burchell, Collin Gordon, and Peter Miller’s The Foucault Effect: Studies

in Governmentality (1991). Thus, scholars engaged the concepts of governmentality and

biopower for sometime without full knowledge of how Foucault theorized the two

concepts.10. To be clear, the lecture distinguishes among sovereign power, disciplinary power, and

biopower. While each form of power comes into history at a particular moment, none

simply supersedes or replaces the other. Rather, they complement each other,

complicating the practices and purposes of power relations as history progresses.

Agamben (1995, 2011) makes the inseparability of these three types of power even more

explicit.11. This parallels Goodnight and Green’s (2010) argument that rhetoric is an act of mimesis

that recursively produces order (the singular) out of multiple differences.12. Bitzer (1968), for example, defines rhetorical situation as a pragmatic response to an

exigency and Chaput (2010) redefines this within neoliberal circulation. This attention to

concrete, historically contingent situations is likely why Foucault is often understood as a

functionalist (see Brenner 1994). However, it should be stressed that this description of

the dispositif clearly aligns more with a rhetorical logic of practical reasoning than with a

philosophical emphasis on the discovery of truth (see Farrell 1993; Greene 1998).13. Foucault (2008) connects this call for a neoliberal utopia to Hayek, describing it as a ‘fairly

free reformulation of Hayek’s reflections in his post-script to The Constitution of Liberty’(p. 234, n11). Certainly, Hayek calls for a more robust representation of his philosophy in

this postscript. But elsewhere he explicitly calls for a utopia. Earlier, in his 1949 ‘The

Intellectuals and Socialism,’ Hayek (2005) calls for ‘a liberal Utopia’ through the creation

and circulation of sound bites capable of encapsulating the complex concepts of

neoliberalism (p. 128).14. Foucault discusses Gary Becker throughout much of his 14 March 1979 lecture in Birth of

Biopolitics. For a more conservative reflection on that chapter and Foucault’s interpreta-

tion of Becker, see ‘Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker et al. (2012).’15. Although Levitt and Dubner are listed as coauthors of the two books referenced in our

analysis, we parenthetically cite only Levitt because he is the trained economist

responsible for the content of the books.

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Catherine Chaput (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Departmentof English, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV, USA. Email: cchaput@unr.edu

Joshua S. Hanan, Department of Communication Studies, University of Denver, Denver,CO, USA.

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