François Jullien and the limitations of managerial ethics in light of politics today

The limitations of the thought of François Jullien are in the connection of his ethics that his advertisements for (classical) Chinese culture and its style of thinking have to governmentality. And that indeed would seem to be a limitation of classical Chinese metaphysics. Indeed, surely every metaphysics is latently an ethics, and much of ethics metaphysical, and all metaphysics is governmental rather than political, because it theorizes what is and how it is, that is, how things essentially are.

Thus, in Chinese thought as Jullien represents it, the prescriptions for living the good life are identical with those of statecraft and war. The Tao or 'way' (of nature, world, life, and self) is managerial. The Sage is the Master. (Even if he has the free-floating attention, and thus the supple wisdom, adaptable to situations in their concreteness, of the Analyst.). He knows how to make use of situations efficaciously, to get what he wants, and to prevail. For all situations are strategic games. The subject who seeks happiness must find it by succeeding in social situations involving the power and force of others who seek to dominate him.

This means that Jullien's ethics is also a philosophy of business management. But the problem with philosophies of management is that in fact business is never political, nor is government by itself (in particular, a purely administrative government without legislative bodies that debate and vote is not, but that is the essence of government, for which legislative democracy is always conceived as a means, with the end being that which is decided and thus can be implemented, and, which is much the same thing, enforced).

Politics is making an issue of and contesting the way things are. This is different from a mere dispute between two persons, except as it touches on the way things are more generally. Thus, both the novel and film, which are able to critically represent social forms through aesthetic forms and discourses, are political in a way that theater, which remains tied to dramatic conflict between individuals and cannot easily render plastic its mise-en-scène, is not. Politics is calling to question the order of things, not just a set of policies, but the way things are arranged and appear, the mise-en-scène. There is no politics without a society; the thesis of the political asserts that society exists, only not as authoritative, but as something at stake and at issue. (Heidegger, who argued that Being has this character for us, was thus grounding a politics at the level of ontology, which he failed to develop in its properly political sense).

The identification of politics with ethics that reduces the former to the latter is a feature of philosophical antiquity in both East and West, as is the association of the good with satisfaction, such that my obligations and my happiness are wholly consistent with each other. In the West, a modern tradition that includes Machiavelli, Marx, and Foucault breaks with this classicism and asserts the autonomy of the political. This also gives society a history that is irreducible to its nature. Politics can no longer be grounded in a universal metaphysics, as metaphysics itself is replaced with a series or set of distinct social worlds in which discourses and practices are organized in certain coherent but socially contingent ways.

For Foucault, politics diverges from ethics at every point. At every point, within any situation, I can always do what enables me to most likely and best realize my ends while adapting myself to the situation and struggling against the strategic partner's resistances and initiated force to do so; or I can work on criticizing and opposing situations of this type, a possibility that depends on these situations being part of some larger social fabric that itself can be conceptually grasped, criticized, and opposed or transformed. This latter possibility may depend on a sociological imagination, the ability to see in a situation not only what is demanded or required, within and by it, and which corresponds more or less with the law and individual desires, but also the way in which the situation is an exemplar of a social problem that may be criticized as if, at the moment of doing so, the individual performs a kind of époché, a bracketing out, of the legal or ethical demands of the situation, wanting not to get what he wants, or do what he must, within it, but instead only, in this moment, to criticize it, as if he were an ethnographer only participating so that he can transform his observations into field notes as material for his book.

The political is not so much the strategic games that, for example, must be played by often haplessly powerless individuals, today, against administrators and functionaries, legal and medical personnel, various companies through their customer service representatives, or employers, games one must engage in in part merely to survive. In capitalist societies, businesses are always forced by the field to operate this way in relation to each other and often other stakeholders in their activities. And the individual is conceived on this model (as, e.g., in Hobbes). But for Foucault the political has a 'meta' character in relation to such games; it is, theoretically, or rather conceptually, a thinking about them, and practically a way of intervening in them to change outcomes. A worker asking his boss for a raise is acting as in a merely strategic and tactical situation; so is a labor union going on strike for this purpose. Contrast the revolutionary mass strike, but also any social movement that does not just accept and play with things as arranged by the system, which has its own games, like chess, go, or a card game, that have certain rules and are already set up or 'rigged' - like our politics today, especially in America, where it is mostly based on lobbying, and campaign funding by corporate lobbyists, within gerrymandered districts where the results of elections are almost assured so that only the donors, with their particular interests as ‘stake-holders’, and not voters matter.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that everything that is done outside the normal game is a meta-game that is also a game and that merely invents some new moves or moves in anamorphic or oblique ways, like the indirectness of the Chinese strategist (businessman or warrior) that Jullien so well theorizes. This is indifferent to the question of planning versus spontaneity, since strategy can be spontaneous. Perhaps all strategy is both a response to the other person's actual and anticipated moves, and to the whole form of the game, or even the system of similar games with its rules, as in bureaucratic organizations. Maybe the difference is only in something like intention: There is a political will that wants to change things in a way that it knows may diverge from an ethics of living well by ‘going on’ effectively within the shape of things as they are. It seems classical Chinese thought tends to lacks this wholly, a tendency also found in classical Greek and Roman thought wherever the political is associated with the good.

In recent terms, this also shows up in the nonviolence debate, the position of M.L. King against Malcolm X that, because politics is a form of ethics, antagonistic, or anger-driven, tactics are a priori politically ineffective because they are immoral, while one speaks truth to power because changing society entails opposing power and one can only effectively oppose by convincing. King does not separate the opponent from the political struggle's addressee (the news media, and now also social media, affecting the larger public, and in turn the government), just as he does not separate the need to fight or convince an opponent from the desire to change the society, and so the problem of how to win a social struggle adds nothing to that of how to love your neighbor along the way. In fact, King lessens the problem of violence in politics by reducing it to a sin, which is a consequence of reducing politics to morality. The much more compelling and far-reaching reason why the left globally has abandoned a belief in the strategic value of violence is that for several reasons it has come to have none.

For of course, on the one hand, our police states are more or less all-powerful in the use of military force, along with other forms of often very coercive social control, including informational and computational techniques facilitated by popular uses of technology, to combat protestors and govern populations. No organized political opposition is going to ‘win’ by defeating these police states using their methods. Social movements, including popular coups d’état that are sometimes advertised as revolutions (of which they have some characteristics), will succeed, as they have at least in some, albeit limited, ways, only by making use of or developing strategies and tactics that give them the advantage.

One can suppose that a revolution will happen, if one ever does, when at least these two conditions have been met: first, an alternative to our present capitalist police states begins to seem possible, and secondly, a means of bringing it into being become available. It is in this strategic context, and for such reasons, that ‘non-violent’ political tactics are today preferred, and necessary. (That includes but may not be limited to the now classical model of unarmed and non-combative mass protest, as in Gandhi and the American Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, the dominant tactic also in most recent political protest movements, including the successful ones, most of which were aimed at toppling a dictatorship and engaged the narratives proper to the liberal tradition of political thought, while those that targeted capitalism or aspects of its current form have so far generally failed. Almost no one believes that the failure of the latter was due to their tactics; it was due more to the absence of a clear horizon of expectation of an alternative social system.) In this something else, and much more, is at stake in this than the merely sinful, because angry, treatment of a neighbor. That is a different problem, manifest on a different plane, one that is essentially ethical and not political at all, even if it is correct, as on that plane it certainly is.

Always, in identifying the political with the ethical, classical thought reduces it to governmentality and so precludes it from the outset.