Lecture
Two – 14th January 1976[1]
In the first moments of
the second lecture in his ‘Society Must Be Defended’ series, Michel Foucault
outlines the rationale behind his current research. Simply put, this is the
extent to which ‘war’ can provide a fundamental insight into the analysis of
power relations. Foucault phrases this overarching question in the following
manner:
“Can we find in bellicose
relations, in the model of war, in the schema of struggle or struggles, a
principle that can help us understand and analyse political power, to interpret
political power in terms of war, struggles and confrontations?”
From here, he contends that he
wishes to begin unpacking this through the concept of the ‘military
institution’ that has functioned within society since the seventeenth century.
Once
again, as in the first lecture, Foucault wishes to revise some of his earlier
work in order to demonstrate how this flows into the topic at hand. The first
claim he makes is that his project between 1970 and 1971 was concerned with the
‘how’ of power, in order to understand its mechanisms. In this he establishes
two limits or markers:
1) The rules of right that formally
demarcate power.
2)
The truth-effects that power produces.
In this, there are
three major concepts that form the building blocks of Foucault’s grasp regarding
the ‘how’ of power, forming a structure between them in a triangular fashion as
such:
Power, Right, and Truth thus form a
mutually constructive relationship to one another that forge a certain basis of
power relations themselves. In traditional terms, this often leads to a rather
specific question, namely, how does discourses of truth (and included in this
is the discourse of philosophy) establish the limits of power’s right? So, how
does truth co-constitute the right of power? This traditional question of
political philosophy, in usual fashion, Foucault dismisses for another.
Instead, he chooses to formulate
the problem differently, emphasising not how truth discourses lead to the right
of power, but rather what type of power is capable of producing discourses of
power that have such formidable effects? Or, in a different frame, what are the
rules of right that stem from power to produce discourses on truth? The
traditional question concerns Truth – Right – Power; Foucault’s mechanises this
trio differently, as Power – Right – Truth – i.e. the reverse. Why reformulate
this?
Relations of power cannot be
severed from the discourse of truth, and neither can they be formed nor operate
without such discourses in circulation. Power thus relies on truth discourses.
“Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth
function in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power”, and in this our
contemporary societies are structured in a peculiar way.
The first aspect of this concerns
the way we are forced and obliged to tell the truth, condemned to admit or
discover it. Truth is produced, Foucault exclaims, in the same manner that we
must produce wealth, and thus we must produce truth so to produce
wealth. I do have a question with this, in relation to the first lecture.
Simply put, Foucault relates truth production to wealth production, yet in the previous
lecture he explicitly states that economic conceptualisations of the
truth-power nexus require overhauling. In this, perhaps he falls into a trap he
critiques others for also doing? Nonetheless, it is the discourse on truth that
lays down the law, that decides, coveys and drives the outcome of a discourse
of truth (truth-effects). This shifts the initial triangular relation between
Truth, Power and Right to a dual relation; between rules of power and the power
of truth discourses.
This, as Foucault explains, is the
general domain which he wishes to investigate and examine. In order to do this,
he begins by discussing the relationship between law and royal power.
In western societies, the
elaboration of juridical thought has essentially centred around royal power
since the Middle Ages. The juridical edifice of society was forged in order to
serve as the instrument and justification of royal power, aiding the notion we
hold in the west that right is the right of the royal command; stemming from
the reactivation of Roman law in the Middle Ages and reconstructing a certain
absolutism located in the personage of the royal sovereign.[2] In later centuries, and
the coming of the Modern era, the judicial edifice escaped from royal control
and turned against royal power, turning the issue at stake into the limits
of power and its prerogatives after its detachment from the absolutism of
divine monarchical right. This turned tradition on its head, especially
considering that the western juridical system concerned the king, their rights
and the limits of their power – remaining fixated with the limits of royal
power until even today.
In either sense, the ‘western’
judicial edifice was concerned with royal power in one of two ways: (a)
demonstrating the sempiternal sovereign authority vested in the body of the
king, or, (b) demonstrating that the power of the sovereign had to be limited
in order to retain its legitimacy. Thus, we can see that from the Middle Ages
onwards, the essential role of the theory of right was to establish the
legitimacy of power – connecting the theory of right to the problem of
sovereignty.
The
problem of right in connection to sovereignty holds an essential function regarding
the technique and discourse of right to dissolve overt domination and replace
it in a masked form with two things: (a) the legitimate rights of the
sovereign, on the one hand, and (b) the legal obligation to obey on the other –
centring the system of right on the king, and as such, eliminating the
appearance of domination and its consequences. The General project for Foucault
in past years, he mentions, was to invert this analysis. His attempt had been
to, in his own terms:
“stress the fact of domination –
that is self-evident – but also how, to what extent, and in what form right
(and when I say right, I am not thinking of just the law, but of all the
apparatuses, institutions, and rules that apply it) serves as a vehicle for and
implements relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but
relations of domination.”[3]
Indeed, Foucault wishes to stress
the opposite of the traditional problem of sovereignty in relation to the
theory of right, i.e., that relations of right serve to implement not relations
of sovereignty (of rights legitimation and obedience) but of domination.
What
is ‘right’ and ‘domination’ in this sense? How does Foucault understand what these
conceptual terms? Domination, for Foucault, exists as “the multiple forms of
domination that can be exercised in society”, thus, he shifts emphasis from the
king in their central position to subjects in their reciprocal relations that
take place and function within the social body, and that come to the surface as
subjugation. Right, should be views not in terms of legitimacy to be forged,
but as a vehicle for the subjugation it implements, intricately connecting both
domination and rights as subjugating forces, shifting emphasis away from
sovereignty and subjugation. From here, Foucault maintains that a number of
methodological precautions must undergo discussion. Indeed, he lists five:
1) Power can be grasped
by focussing on its extremities, where it becomes less judicial.
3) Power passes through the individuals it has constituted.
4) This circulation of
power is true up until only a certain point of limit.
5) It is possible that ideological production did coexist with
the great machineries of power.
Let’s investigate each of these
briefly. The first methodological precaution Foucault identifies is that the
object of investigation is to understand power by focussing on its extremities
and its outer limits, i.e., to grasp power at its most peripheral and extreme manifestations.
Foucault does give an example of the ‘power to punish’, quietly linking to the
work in his famous ‘Discipline and Punish’ that was published in the
months prior to these lectures. Rather than trying to discern how the power to
punish locates its basis in sovereignty, in terms of monarchical or democratic
right, ‘Discipline and Punish’ focuses on how the power to punish was
expressed in a certain number of local, regional, and material institutions
like imprisonment or torture, whilst simultaneously concerned with the
institutional, physical, regulatory and violent frame of the actual apparatus
of punishment. This is an example of how power can itself be grasped by
focussing on its extremities – in the orbit of the local.
Secondly – The central tenet of
this methodological precaution concerns not to approach power at the level of
intentions or decisions, nor to approach it from the ‘inside’ and ask ‘who has
power?’. Foucault’s goal, he claims, is to study power at the point where the
intentions of them who hold power are completely invested in real and effective
practices, by studying its ‘external’ face – i.e., the place where “it [power]
implants itself and produces its real effects”. As opposed to asking what the
sovereign appears like from on high, one ought to ask how individual bodies are
constituted as both political subjects and a conscious subject.
This is precisely the opposite of
what we can say Thomas Hobbes was attempting with his seminal 1651 work ‘Leviathan’.
The concern of the early modern and medieval jurists was to discover how a
multiplicity of individual drives can be shaped into a single will as a body
politic. Foucault asks us to recall the schema of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here, the
Leviathan is no more than the coagulation of a distinct number of individuals,
united by the state’s constituent elements. At the heart, or head rather, is
something that constitutes the entire body, and this is the sovereign – the
soul of the Leviathan as Hobbes describes it. Rather than raising the issue of
a ‘central soul’, Foucault claims that we should be studying the multiple
bodies that constitute the material of the Leviathan at its periphery, by
studying “the bodies that are constituted as subjects by power-effects”.
Thirdly - Power passes through the
individuals it has constituted. Power is not an entity that is divided between
those who are exclusively its bearers and those are not, being subject to it.
“Power must”, Foucault asserts, “be analysed as something that circulates, or
rather something that functions only when it is part of a chain”. Power is not
posited in specific localities alone, in this site or that. Power functions and
exists through networks, and individuals are in a position to both submit to
and exercise power via this network. “They are never the inert or consenting
targets of power; they are always its relays”.[4] Power passes through
individuals, it is not applied to them, it is not necessarily a tangible
entity. It would be an error, therefore, to think of the individual as a
primitive atom or nucleus to which power is applied or struck by. Reflectively,
power indeed permits the constitution of an entity to be identified as
something individual. “The individual is not, in other words, power’s opposite
number; the individual is one of power’s first effects”, i.e., the constitution
of the individual is a power-effect, and simultaneously they are a despatcher
of that power - power passes through the individuals it constitutes.
Fourthly - This circulation of
power is true up until only a certain point of limit. Power does indeed pass or
migrate through both our bodies (as relays) but also through the body politic
as a whole. This being said, power is not distributed either democratically or
anarchically. As a result of this, an analysis should concern the way in which
the phenomena, techniques, and procedures of power ‘come into play’ at the
lowest, or rather most peripheral, levels, as opposed to beginning at the
centre and assessing how far it is reproduced away from that innermost potent
site – linking to Foucault’s grasp of ‘subjugated knowledges’ in the first
lecture.
Foucault
goes on to discuss this fourth point in relation to Madness, connecting to his
early work ‘Madness and Civilization’. Discussing the relations between
the discourse of madness and Bourgeois society, Foucault explains that analysis
should focus on the localisation and power-effects upon general discourse as a whole.
In most cases, analysis generally centres its attention on the primary effects
from the rule of the Bourgeoisie in relation to productive forces, i.e.,
how madness is not conducive to production, and as such, became excluded.
Contrary to this, rather, one should look “in historical terms, and from below,
at how control mechanism come into play in terms of the exclusion of madness,
or the repression and suppression of sexuality”. Focus should turn to the
agents of power not within the Bourgeoisie in general, but the agents of the
power-effects upon discourse existing within social structure, e.g. amongst and
within the family, parents, doctors, nurses, police constables, and so on. What
is significant to highlight is not that exclusion had to occur, but that the
techniques and procedures of exclusion itself came into being through the
power-effects on discourse. This is what interests Foucault, in discerning how
these mechanisms and techniques of exclusion became part of the whole.
“In other words, the bourgeoisie
doesn’t give a damn about the mad, but from the nineteenth century onward and
subject to certain transformations, the procedures used to exclude the
mad produced or generated a political profit, or even a certain economic utility.
They consolidated the system and helped it to function as a whole. The
Bourgeoisie is not interested in the mad, but is interested in power over the
mad.”[5]
Fifthly - It is possible that
ideological production does coexist with the great machineries of power. Foucault
begins his discussion of this methodological precaution by declaring that he
did not think that ideologies are shaped at ‘the base’, at the point where the
networks of power culminate. The mechanisms of power are unable to function unless
knowledge, and the apparatuses of said knowledge, are formed, organised and
spread. Equally, Foucault emphasises that these epistemological apparatuses are
non-ideological. A critique that I think is important to cite against Foucault
here is that although he tells us what is not ideological, he does not
explicate how he grasps the very concept of ‘ideology’ itself. It would be
foolish of us to simply assume a Marxian undercurrent in his conceptual grasp
of ideology, i.e. as ‘false consciousness’, considering his postfoundationalism
and anti-Marxism generally. Thus, although Foucault does illuminate much
concerning the structures of knowledge in relation to ideology, by neglecting
to etch out a basic grasp of the concept, one is left begging therefore what
these knowledge structures are not to a greater extent – this precaution
acts to mystify, not to clarify. Even in this, he dedicates only a moment to
this fifth precaution, and as such, one cannot help but feel greater
development of the point was perhaps necessary.
From
here, Foucault engages with a summary of all five methodological precautions
his project involves. In his own words:
“I think we should orient our
analysis of power toward material operations, forms of subjugation, and the
connections among and the uses made of the local systems of subjugation on the
one hand, and apparatuses of knowledge on the other.”
For the sake of a pictorial
representation of what Foucault affirms should be the anchor of an analysis of
power, the following is a diagram of what he claims above:
All in all, Foucault makes it clear
that the Hobbesian model of the leviathan requires jettisoning, at least for
the analysis of power-effects, beginning with centring focus on the techniques
and tactics of domination and subjugation.
In
this, a unifying fact emerges for Foucault, namely, that: “the
juridico-political theory of sovereignty – the theory we have to get away from
if we want to analyse power – dates from the Middle Ages” and stems from the
reactivation of roman law. This theory of sovereignty, he claims, plays four
roles:
1) It referred to the actual power
mechanism of the feudal monarchy.
2) It was used as an instrument to
constitute and justify the great monarchical administrations.
3) It was used to both restrict and
strengthen royal power.
4) It was used was used
to construct an alternative model to authoritarian or absolute monarchical
administration in the eighteenth century, especially in relation to Rousseauian
thought, i.e., that of popular democracy and the ‘General Will’ (volonté générale).
In
other words, the power relations that emerged from sovereignty, understood in
both a broad and narrow sense, where coextensive with the entire social body.
Equally, the manner in which power was exercised could be chronicled in terms
of subject/sovereign relations. With the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
a new phenomenon came into being as the appearance of a new mechanism of power
with specific procedures that were irreconcilable with relations of sovereignty
that applies primarily to bodies – in terms of corporeal sovereignty – making
it possible to extract time and labour; a type of power that is exercised
through constant surveillance and not discontinuously through systems of
taxation and obligation. Foucault expresses that this form of power, this new
phenomenon of corporeal subjugation, is the opposite form of power that the
theory of sovereignty aimed to transcribe. Foucault explains this through the
distinction between power over land and that over bodies:
“The theory of sovereignty is bound
up with a form of power that is exercised over the land and the produce of the
land, much more so than over bodies and what they do…The theory of sovereignty
is, if you like, a theory which can found absolute power on the absolute
expenditure of power, but which cannot calculate power within minimum
expenditure and maximum efficiency.”
This new form of power that
Foucault attempts to sketch out cannot be understood in terms of sovereignty,
and is one of the Bourgeoisie’s great inventions. This, Foucault claims, is
‘disciplinary power’ and it cannot be justified in terms of sovereignty alone.
Disciplinary power, thus, in Foucault’s framework, is distinct from that of the
theory of sovereignty. In this, however, the theory of sovereignty continued to
function as an ideology of right, of sorts, and to organise the juridical codes
that the nineteenth century would come to adopt in the post-Napoleonic era. Foucault
asks “Why did the theory of sovereignty live on in this way as an ideology and
as the organizing principle behind the great juridical codes?”. Effectively,
why did the theory of sovereignty remain extant? I would like to add that
Foucault still does not conceptualise his grasp of ideology, but the question
he does ask is fascinating.
He
provides a twofold answer. Firstly, the theory of sovereignty was a permanent
critical mechanism to be employed against the monarchy and all the obstacles
that restricted the advancement of a disciplinary society. Secondly, the theory
of sovereignty made it possible to place over the mechanisms of discipline a
frame of right that hid its apparatus and erased the elements and techniques of
domination involved in discipline. Simply put, judicial systems permitted the
democratization of sovereignty precisely because the democratization of
sovereignty was heavily stabilised by the mechanisms of disciplinary coercion.
In his own words:
“To put it in more condensed terms,
one might say that once disciplinary constraints had to both function as
mechanisms of domination and be concealed to the extent that they were the mode
in which power was actually exercised, the theory of sovereignty had to find
expression in the juridical apparatus and had to be reactivated or complemented
by judicial codes”.
A brief point of order, perhaps, is
the extent to which this concealment was undertaken consciously or occurred
under the radar, so to speak. Nonetheless, from the nineteenth century until
the present day, we have constructed in our societies, firstly, a discourse and
an organization of public right articulated around the sovereignty of the
social body, and secondly, that a dense squaring of disciplinary coercion
exists that guarantees the cohesion of that body. The two are mutually
constructive, i.e., a right of sovereignty and a mechanics of discipline go
hand in hand; between these two is where power is exercised and one can never
truly be reduced to the other – they function in tandem. Indeed – “power is
exercised through, on the basis of, and in the very play of the heterogeneity
between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous mechanics of
discipline”.
Moving on from this, Foucault
explains that the discourse of disciplines concerns not a discourse of
juridical rule derived from sovereignty, but one regarding a so-called rule of
nature that had simply become the norm. Disciplines define a code of
normalization and as such refer not to the edifice of law, but rather the field
of the human sciences and its jurisprudence of clinical knowledge – linking the
discussion back to the topic of power/knowledge that Foucault introduced in the
first lecture. The gradual constitution of the human sciences, and its
discourse, has been made possible by the juxtaposition of (a) the organisation
of right around sovereignty, and on the other hand, (b) the mechanics of coercion
exercised by disciplines. Thus, contemporarily, power is exercised through both
right and disciplines. The mechanisms of discourse that arise by means of discipline
invade the notion of right, and as such, normalising procedures increasingly ‘colonise’
the procedures of the law. Interestingly, perhaps Foucault draws a connection,
even an interchangeability, here between the notions/acts of ‘normalisation’
and ‘colonisation’. The workings of this juxtaposition are what he pens as
‘normalising society’.
To be
more specific, Foucault describes this postulation in the following manner:
“I think that normalization, that
disciplinary normalizations, are increasingly in conflict with the juridical system
of sovereignty; the incompatibility of the two is increasingly apparent; there
is greater and greater need for a sort of arbitrating discourse, for a sort of
power and knowledge that has been rendered neutral because its scientificity
has become sacred.”
Where does Foucault see
this confrontation, however? His answer to this is in the expansion of medicine
and the ‘medicalisation’ of behaviour – relating to his ‘Madness and
Civilization’ and ‘The Birth of The Clinic’. This process, this
medicalization of social behaviour, Foucault claims, has taken place whilst
overlaying the point at which the discipline and sovereignty meet. To continue
in his own words:
“That is why we now find ourselves
in a situation where the only existing and apparently solid recourse we have
against the usurpations of disciplinary mechanics and against the rise of a
power that is bound up with scientific knowledge is precisely a recourse or a
return to a right that is organized around sovereignty, or that is articulated
on that old principle.”
The question remains however, after
assessing and analysing where the discourses of scientific knowledge and
sovereignty meet, what happens in real life, in concrete terms? Foucault argues
that against this juxtaposition, state edifices invoke the older formal notion
of bourgeois right that is, in reality, the right of sovereignty. Nonetheless,
critically, undertaking a recourse to sovereignty against the
power-effects of discipline will not enable the limitation of the
effects of disciplinary power. To limit the effects of disciplinary power,
Foucault seems to be suggesting, one must go beyond the normalised liberal
framework that seeks to limit such disciplinary power by no more than an appeal
to rights.
All in all, sovereignty and
discipline, the right of the sovereignty, disciplinary apparatuses, and
legislation constitute the general mechanisms of power in our contemporary
society. If we wish to search for a ‘non-disciplinary power’ the old right of
sovereignty must no longer be turned to, but rather a new mode of right
that is both (a) antidisciplinary and (b) emancipated from the principle of
sovereignty all together. In the net lecture, Foucault turns his attention to
the imbedded logic of war and struggle at the heart of disciplinary society.
[1] Michel Foucault (2020) Society
Must Be Defended: Lectures at The Collège de France, 1975-1976, London:
Penguin Books, pp. 23-42.
[2] Reminded me of Ernst H.
Kantorowicz (2016) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political
Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[3] Emphasis added.
[4] Although I do not wish to make
comparisons, or state the existence of power in this way as such, my mind is
always drawn to the Deleuzian notion of a Rhizome here because of the manner in
which Foucault claims power functions as a network where individuals are its
relays. Here, with power as a network of relays and reaction, the six
principles of a rhizome may apply: connection, homogeneity, multiplicity,
asignifying rupture, cartography and decalcomania.
[5] Emphasis added.