STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France
Spring Semester 2011
*Feb. 15 Society Must Be Defended, 1-140, Hyunkyoung Cho
[Fig 1] Memorial / Isolation (Installation, Fiona Davies, http://www.fionadavies.com.au/default4.asp)
This is an installation in 2007 at Maitland Hospital. An isolation ward and a home for the nurse's who worked in the isolation ward was built at this hospital in the early 1900's. The two buildings were tucked out of the way in a corner of the grounds of the hospital. Two old hospital beds were located in the foyer of the administration section of the hospital. One bed was covered with a sheet embroidered with the architectural details of the buildings while the other held a paper mould of a mortuary slab. The work also refers to the context of contemporary uses of physical isolation of patients and staff as a means of controlling infection.
Power-Network; The Connection of Power– War – Politics
Power is war.
Politics sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war.
The final decision can come only war.
The historico-political discourse as the strategic model for the analysis of power relations
The historico-political discourse is the strategic model for the analysis of power relations. It is an attempt to escape the philosophico-juridical discourse that underlines the power-relation in the regime of representation; it emphasizes the historical analysis and finds another form (the regime of presentation) that does not depend on the juridical system.
As a new way breaking through the conceptual impasse (another system of formulation/analysis of power/alternative ways of analyzing power), it articulates a mode of thought that analyzes power relations in terms of the model of the war.
The discourse as strategic games (as a battle, a place, a weapon, struggle)
The historico-political discourse realizes ‘the form of strategic intelligibility.’ The form of strategic intelligibility is the nonlinguistic level of the analysis of discourse; it allows us to see how one can do nonlinguistic analysis of statement. Treat statement in their functioning.
What is at stake in the discourse (the key for the nonlinguistic analysis) is the performativity as the performative characteristic of discourse; the concept of the performative was coined from J. L. Austin; it notes that ‘to say something is to do’; it focuses on the coinciding (the presenting/ the simultaneous/the real-time)
Insomuch as the discourse involves with the performative, it becomes a strategic game; the description of statement is not complete when one have defined the linguistic structure of the statement, that the analysis of discourse can not be reduced to the combination of elements according to linguistic rules, that therefore “discourse is something that necessarily extends beyond language.” The reason why the discourse should be examined at the two levels of their tactical productivity and of their strategic integration.
A weapon to reveal the power, War as Repression
The historico-political discourse of war functions as a weapon to reveal a perspectival character of truth (knowledge). Because there is a war and truth (knowledge) is the effect of war.
The war is the continuation organized in the multiplicity of power-relations (unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, tense force-relations).[1] It follows the mechanism of power as a basic and essential repression; Power is essentially that which represses. Power is that which represses nature, instincts, a class, or individuals. Power is basically and essentially repression.
At this point, we can understand Foucault’s insight (as the inverted version of Clausewitz’s proposition) that “Power is war, the continuation of war by other means.” The perspective designate that the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals. It spells out that the politics sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war. Therefore, the final decision can come only war; the last battle would put an end to politics.
Power-Network
1. The connection of two hypotheses to analyze power
1) The mechanism of power is repression. (Reich’s hypothesis). 2)The basis of the power-relationship lies in a warlike clash between forces. (Nietzsche’s hypothesis). Here, the crucial point is that the two hypotheses are not irreconcilable. There is a logical connection between the two. It implies that the power should be analyzed in the concept (or the perspectival character) of network.
2. The war-repression schema
Two schemata for the analysis of power: the contract-oppression schema is the juridical schema, and the war-repression schema or domination-repression schema
The power-network proposes the war-repression schema. It is not the pertinent opposition, the previous schema (the contract-oppression schema), that between the legitimate and the illegitimate. It is that between struggle and submission.
In the classical theory of political right, the power has been analyzed in terms of the contract-oppression schema. The oppression is constituted by the power overstepping the limits of the contract, rather the transgression of the limit. (when the power that has been so constituted oversteps the limit, or oversteps the limits of the contract, there is a danger that it will be oppression. Power-contract, with oppression as the limit, or rather the transgression of the limit.)
It means that we can have the other system, the war-repression schemata (the domination-repression), since the repression is not what oppression is in relation to the contract, namely an abuse (the result of the abuse of sovereignty), but, on the contrary simply the effect and the continuation of a relationship of domination. Repression is no more than the implementation, within a pseudopeace that is being undermined by a continuous war, of a perpetual relationship of force.
3. Subject / individual (the political subject) in the power-network
Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.
It is a mistake to think of the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom or some multiple, insert matter to which power is applied, or which is struck by a power that subordinates or destroys individuals. In actual fact, one of the first effects of power is that it allows bodies, gestures, discourses, and desires to be identified and constituted as something individual. The individual is one of power’s first effects. The individual is in fact a power-effect, and at the same time, and to the extent that he is a power-effect, the individual is a relay: power passes through the individuals it has constituted.
Power is exercised, circulated, and forms networks.
4. Power-network performs (functions).
What the power-network (the strategic model analyzing power relations, the war as analyzer revealing the power-network) means is;
There is no such thing as a neutral subject. In the power-network, we are all inevitably someone’s adversary. The theory of sovereignty presupposes the subject; its goal is to establish the essential unitary power, and it is always deployed within the preexisitng element of the law. It therefore assumes the existence of three “primitive’s elements; a subject who has to be subjectified, the unitary power that has to be founded, and the legitimacy that has to be respected.”
The irony of Hobbes’s the primitive war; the war of every man against every man? Reversely, it reveals a truth that “Difference leads to peace.” Insofar as the absence of natural difference creates uncertainties, risks, hazards and therefore, the will to fight on both sides, there is no battles in Hobbes’s primitive war. Rather, there are representation, manifestation, signs, emphatic expression; there are traps, intentions disguised as their opposite, and worries disguised as certainties. We are is theater where presentations are exchanged, in a relationship of fear in which there are no time limits; we are not really involved in a war.
Where there is power, there is always resistance and the two things coexist; as soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensured by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy. The field in which power is deployed is therefore not that of a doleful and stable domination.
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