With Lockdown 3.0 here,
I have decided to re-read the famed Michel Foucault’s lecture course that he
gave at the Collège de France in 1976, entitled: ‘Society
Must Be Defended’, alongside those other works I am currently focussing my
attention on. Although sometimes critical of his overall schema of thought, it
is often a joy to think alongside Foucault, even when – especially when – we differ.
Equally, so many have been influenced by the thought of Foucault – even in
their opposition to his thinking – that it always helps to return to him. The first
lecture was held on Wednesday the 7th of January 1976, and every Wednesday
after until the 17th of March of the same year. Forty-four years
later, on the same dates and at the same times as Foucault’s lectures were
given, I will add to the blog my notes and thoughts on each lecture.
Lecture
One–
7th January 1976 [1]
The first question that
Foucault asks is ‘What is a lecture?’. He affirms that the purpose of his
lecture series, if there can be a purpose at all, is to present those willing
to listen with his research for them to use (or not) in any way they wish – in
keeping with the spirit that the Collège de France is a research institute. This
being said, Foucault, rather comically, highlights that in order to limit the
number of spectators at his lectures, he has set the time to be on Wednesday mornings
so that those who really do wish to engage must first get out of bed to do so –
aiming this at undergraduates. Conscious that his past lectures required overflow
viewing areas, this is one of the few points we see Foucault at unease with the
fact of being an object of a gaze that is not mutual (perhaps equally informing
us as to why his thought on the penal system, the panopticon, and ‘the gaze’
are a site of angst for him). From here, Foucault explains what his previous
research points towards, as but ‘fragments of research’ which he then begins to
list:
“A
few remarks on the history of penal procedure; a few chapters on the evolution,
the institutionalisation of psychiatry in the nineteenth century; considerations
on sophistry or Greek coins; an outline history of sexuality, or at least a
history of knowledge about sexuality…; pinpointing the genesis of a theory and
knowledge of anomalies and of all the related techniques.”
From here, Foucault
outlines that the possibilities of uses for these fragments are open-ended, to
even the point at which “perhaps we’re not saying anything at all” because their
direction was not pre-determined, “it didn’t matter where they led”. This pins
his system and intellectual character immediately as one dedicated to thought
for the sake of thinking – even if we disagree with the outcome of that thought
– and not thought in the name of ‘outputs’ or so to avoid the latter of ‘publish
or perish’, but to think for itself.
Foucault isolates that
two phenomena had been observable in the few decades prior to this lecture:
1. “The efficacy of dispersed and
discontinued offensives” – Those ‘localised’ critiques that challenge the
status-quo, i.e. the push for an increasingly permissive society, or critiques
of judicial and penal apparatuses. This includes what he cites as the “fairly
dubious” notion of Class Justice – dubious as a conceptual phenomenon (in which
case we see an inherent critique of Marxism here), or as to what the conceptual
phenomenon has become and the framework in which it is employed? Foucault does
not answer this. Equally, he goes on to cite Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guttari, with its expounding of Schizoanalysis, as a phenomenon of
theoretical creativity deserving of the label ‘an event’. To return to the
grander phenomenon Foucault isolates, he is referring to an increasing academic
tendency of criticism, an “immense and proliferating criticizability of things”
that has had to occur following the loss of certain grounds for truth-claims or
frameworks which just simply do not apply any longer; where there is “ground
crumbling beneath our feet”, and this is where we can see his
post-foundationalism at its most potent. This critique is always ‘local’ and
resembles autonomous and de-centralised production of theoretical tools,
distinguishing itself from those totalitarian theories as all encompassing and
global. Here I was reminded on Arendt in ‘On Revolution’ and ‘The
Origins of Totalitarianism’ (also Giorgio Agamben in ‘Stasis’) where
she makes it clear that ideological thinking sees any conflict as a civil war
of humanity, and that this is a contemporary phenomenon that must be given
theoretical attention.[2] So, the first phenomenon –
the proliferation of localised critique to allow for some contingent foundation
of thought in the contemporary world.
2. “The insurrection of subjugated
knowledges” – Indeed much of the remainder of the first lecture in this
series is dedicated to explicating just what is meant by ‘subjugated knowledges’.
Here, Foucault lays out a duad of knowledge categories, each of which contains
and exemplifies modes of subjugated knowledges (notice the plurality).
2a. The first mode of subjugated knowledges
can be broadly related to Foucault’s work on Archaeology. These knowledges consist
of “historical contents that have been buried or masked on functional
coherences or formal systematizations”. Just as in what would normally be inferred
with Archaeology (think ‘Time Team’), one digs through geological layers
in order to find artefacts that inform us of the past, and as such, of the path
to our present. Sometimes this activity can unearth something unbelievable that
changes our understanding of ourselves and that path – like the discovery of
the Terracotta Warriors or the Theopetra Cave. Our role becomes to hoist them
to the surface like buried treasure. Subjugated knowledges, in this form
therefore, are:
“Blocks
of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systemic
ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their
existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship.”
2b. The second mode of subjugated
knowledges concerns those knowledges that have been disqualified. These forms
of knowledge have been disqualified as ‘nonconceptual’, ‘insufficiently
elaborated’, ‘naïve’, ‘hierarchically inferior’ or below a certain level of ‘scientificity’.
This brings us neatly to Foucault’s understanding of power as related to the
structural formulation of what is and what is not acceptable knowledge, i.e.
the notion of knowledge/power. This entails a perspectival, or even subjective,
shift to expose the knowledges of the patient, the nurse, the doctor, the inmate,
the delinquent and that which ‘people know’ as parallel to hierarchical knowledges,
and as such are excluded as meaningful in the hegemonic structural
epistemological schema because of their difference.[3] Simply put, to resuscitate
these knowledges is: “The reappearance
of what is known at the local level , of these disqualified knowledges, that
makes the critique possible”, linking back to the locality of critique in 1.
Therefore,
Foucault effortlessly locates two forms of ‘subjugated knowledges’, both of which
are modes of knowledge that are excluded from the contemporary epistemological hierarchy
and are as such neglected:
a – The buried
b – The disqualified
Together, they create
an outline of what Foucault isolates as ‘Genealogy’ – a term he takes from his
long interest with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. A provisional definition
of this approach – of genealogy – is given as the coupling of scholarship and
local testimony which allow us to constitute a historical knowledge of
struggles and to be able to make use of this knowledge in the contemporary
world. Thus, in this provisional definition of genealogy, Foucault reveals what
is at stake if we were to ignore this approach, and this would be the loss of,
in his own terms, “A historical knowledge of struggles”.
Following
this, in a single paragraph, I see Foucault explicate his entire project in the
simplest of ways, in his discussion of genealogy as, quite specifically, “antisciences”
as “they concern the insurrection of knowledges”. Here, he states:
“It
is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized
knowledges off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able
to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true
body of knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that is in the hands
of a few.”
In this manner, as
Foucault understands it, genealogy fights the power-effects and characteristics
of any discourse that is regarded as scientific, as a discourse that disqualifies
other knowledges through its truth-claims by virtue of simply being a science.
Genealogy is thus struggle. This, for example, leads Foucault to a short
critique of Marxism, in that “it may well be a science” and as such
subordinates other knowledges to a position of subjugation. A question I would
like to ask here, however, is whether or not this is a critique of Marxism as
scientific socialism, through the manner in which Marx himself understood his
own project, or that Marxism as a whole could be scientific (implying
that it may not be and therefore locates an odd non-Marxian Marxism)? Nonetheless,
Foucault draws our attention to the aspiration of domination that comes from a
particular knowledge willing a claim to be considered ‘a science’. Science, as
he grasps it, can become a ‘theoretical vanguard’ (Leninist terminology) that
curtails a number of potential forms that knowledge can take – burying them to
be forgotten or simply disqualifying them as knowledge altogether. The claim of
a discourse to being a discourse as a ‘science’ is subsequently a claim to power,
linking back to Nietzsche and the ‘Will to Power’.
Genealogy,
then, in Foucault’s own words: “is a sort of attempt to desubjugate
historical knowledges”[4], it is an attempt to ‘re-activate’
those local knowledges that have been disqualified and neglected. Through its connection
to archaeology, genealogy is the use of knowledge that was once subjugated. Interestingly,
my initial thought was that Foucault had spun the term Archaeology on its head
through an etymological reconstruction of its use. ‘Archaeology’ stems from the Greek ἀρχαῖος [arkhaios] meaning ‘ancient’ or ‘primeval’. This
in turn goes back further to the term ἀρχή [arkhe] that means ‘beginning’. In an
interesting way, Foucault turns Archaeology into the beginning of genealogical
critique, turning the signifier itself into something new – a new
beginning.
There is a danger
here, however. The danger is that these fragments would be resubjugated by the
disqualifying unitary discourses that excluded them, and in order to protect
them from this, the very protection one creates forms a new unitary discourse
with power/knowledge effects that excludes others. In order to avoid this, Foucault
claims, all one can really do is unearth more genealogical fragments. What
should be attempted he asserts, is: “to specify or identify what is at stake
when knowledges begin to challenge, struggle, and rise up against the
institution and power-knowledge effects of scientific discourse”.
This, neatly, leads
him to have to ask another seminal question, namely, what is power? The issue
becomes to determine what are the mechanisms, effects, and the relations of
various power-knowledge apparatus that operate at various levels of society,
and to bring their domineering consequences into full light for all to bear witness
to. In order to discuss the very nature of power, Foucault highlights two major
conceptions of power in the modern discourse:
1. The Liberal Juridical conception – whereby power is a
commodity or right that is exercised by an agent when they hold its possession
as a result of a contract. My mind was drawn to Robert Dahl’s conceptualisation
of power as: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do
something that B would not otherwise do”.[5]
2. The Marxian Economic Functionality – whereby power is to
perpetuate the relations of production and reproduce class domination. My mind
was drawn here to Louis Althusser’s understanding of state and ideological repressive
apparatuses.[6]
With these two
conceptions of power, which are themselves not irreconcilable, Foucault
isolates two issues: (a) Is power always secondary to commodity-based
economics? (b) Is power always modelled on the economy? In this manner, power
is “of a different order and it is precisely that order that we have to isolate”.
There are few tools for a non-economic analysis of power. What we know is that
it is not something given, exchanged, or taken back, but it exists only
in the exercise of its action. In this, power is primarily in itself a relation
of force, a relationship of struggle. Thus, the first ‘off the cuff’ definition
that Foucault gives of power is that “power is essentially that which represses”.
This raises two further questions: (c) does this make an analysis of power an analysis
of the mechanisms of repression?, and, (d) shouldn’t we be analysing power
therefore in the terms of conflict and war?
If the first ‘off the
cuff’ hypotheses of power that Foucault gives is “essentially that which
represses”, the second that he claims stems from this last question – (d).
Power, in this manner, is the reversal of Clausewitz’s famous statement that ‘War
is an extension of politics by other means’, to state that ‘Politics is an
extension of war by other means’. This implies three things:
1) Power relations are anchored in a certain relationship
of force that was established in and through war at a given historical moment.
Politics is thus a silent war to re-inscribe the relations of force, even when
in a condition of ‘peace’.
2) Politics sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium
of forces manifested at war. “We are always writing the history of the same war”.
3) The last, ‘final’, battle would put an end to
politics, suspending the exercise of power as continuous warfare.
Power that oversteps its
limit will shift from being a repressive apparatus to an oppressive one.
Repression is the effect and continuation of a relationship of domination, and
within it there is its own action and reproduction. The ‘struggle’ therefore, is
not between ‘the legitimate and illegitimate’ but between itself and ‘submission’.
Foucault goes on to state that he has indeed been suspicious of the notion of ‘repression’.
Indeed, the subjugated knowledge that Foucault locates by means of Archaeology
and Genealogy has been more than merely repressed, but gone through a different
process that he does not go on to determine the boundaries of.
From here, he lays out
his structure for the remainder of the lecture series. Till next week.
[1] Michel Foucault (2020) Society
Must Be Defended: Lectures at The Collège de France, 1975-1976, London: Penguin
Books, pp. 1-22.
[2] Hannah Arendt (1976) The Origins
of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Inc.; (2006) On Revolution,
London: Penguin Books; Giorgio Agamben (2015) Stasis: Civil War as a Political
Paradigm, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
[3] Whenever I read this, my mind is
always somehow drawn back to the documentaries by Louis Theroux, and the manner
in which he emphasises his attempt to get to the heart of the perspective of
the inmate, the extremist, the eccentric, the addict, and so on.
[4] Emphasis added.
[5] Robert A. Dahl (1957) ‘The Concept
of Power’, Behavioural Science, 2(3), pp. 201-215, pp. 202-203.
[6] Louis Althusser (2014) Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses, London: Verso.