Intro |
Two books, ‘Psychiatry Power’ and ‘Abnormal’, question “the position of disease (madness) between life and death (PS/336).”
The third book, ‘Society must be defended,’ shows how the life is transformed in the political power. It traces the transformation at the level of mechanisms (system/network), techniques (apparatuses), and technologies (discipline’s essence and technological artefacts/tools) of power.
The study needs to the new methodology. That is the historical and political discourse. As the knowledge production’s new mode, it addresses the power relations performed in the realm of presenting.
The essence of historico-political discourse is in the discourse. It allows us to see “the non-linguistic level of statement,” that is the context or situation beyond language. Since the discourse involves with the performative as the coinciding (the simultaneous) of ‘to say something’ and ‘to do something.’ It performs both aspects of the tactics for productivity and the strategies for integration or connection.
The book, ‘Society must be defended,’ focuses on the definition of hitorico-political discourse and its characteristics. The attempts inscribes that what the society must be defended means is the allowing the histrico-political discourse.
Seven Lecture-18 February 1976The historico-political discourse is One point where two meet. |
The question about power-relations makes a way to fight on two fronts. It is to guarantee both freedoms and rights. The right is the opponent of freedom, insofar as the right is essentially based on victory in invasion.
To make the way, Foucault sets up six questions on the power relation of war. These questions show the potential of historico-politcal discourse.
Questions of Foucault behind Boulainvilliers, the inquiry of the power relations between the Franks, the Gaul, and the Romans as the application of hisotrico-political discourse is follows;
First, What did Franks find in entering Gaul? (144).
It is an economic-political question, not one of public right; Not, did Franks abolish Roman sovereignty? But, why were the Romans defeated? This question helps the understanding the internal reasons.
Second, Who were the Franks who invaded Gaul? (147)
;how did Franks succeed? This question reverses the old concept. It finds the portrait of ideal feudalism; the military caste supported and fed by a peasant population who pays the tax; the Franks and the Gauls lived happily side by side; the Franks were happy because the industrious Gauls provided for their needs, and the Gaul were happy because the Franks gave them security (151).
Third, What happened to the Frankish warriors vis-à-vis monarch? (152). This notices the absolutism and the language-knowledge/power system. That is the alliance of Latin, Roman law, and State.
Fourth, Hence for what? The historico-political discourse calls for the re-inviting. It is to gain a new self-awareness, to trace the sources of knowledge and memory, and finally to denounce all the mystifications of history; “The re-inserting itself into the order (the web) of knowledge (155)” is the very ‘invagination’ in the historico-political discourse.
Fifth, Why are these analyses important?
War can be a general social analyzer for the analysis of power relations. The generalization of war presents 1) the right and its foundations, 2) the battle form, 3) the invasion and rebellion system.
In other words, war operates the threefold generalization.
1) War conceals right, and even natural right (the freedom-equality combination) in the sense that it becomes unreal, abstract, and fictive (156); “So natural right does not exist, or exists only insofar as it has been defeated: it is always history’s loser, it is ‘the other’ ”(158); here we can understand that “War conceals history completely.”
2) War is a war that begins before the battle and continues after it is over (159).
3) The problem is the dialectic of forces (the transition from strength to weakness, and from weakness to strength). The determination of the internal mechanisms of the inversion notes that history is a calculation of force (161).
Sixth, What does this threefold generalization of war lead to? (163)
“War that makes society intelligible (163).” It means that war turns the disruption of right into a grid of intelligibility. Through the war, we can see that “History functions within politics, and politics is used to calculate historical relations of force (164).” It recalls the proposition that “ Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”
| Eight-25 February 1976 The historico-political discourse is the Re-Implanting Knowledge. |
The historico-political discourse is the continuum or interplay of historical narratives and political calculations. It is “the re-implanting the knowledge within the discourse of knowledge itself (170).” It customizes the fact that “history gave us the idea that we are at war; and we wage war through history (172).”
The re-implanting knowledge challenges the ‘disciplinarization of knowledge. It enables us to understand that: 1) what we call science, defined as a general domain, is no less than the disciplinary policing of knowledge (182); 2) the transformation of university (the new disciplinary role of university) is in the selection, classification, normalization, centralization of knowledge, and it accelerates the disappearance of the amateur scholar (183).
By the re-implanting, we move from the orthodoxy to the othology; “we move from the censorship of statements to the disciplinarization of enunciations, or from orthodoxy to what I would call “orthology,” to a form of control that is now exercised on a disciplinary basis (184).”
| Nine-3 March 1976 The historico-political discourse weaves the network performed in the tactical reversibility of the discourse. |
The tactical generalization of knowledge can be characterized by the way to use four elements; constitution, revolution, barbarism, and domination (197). It can be summarized with the economy of barbarism in the revolution (198).
It notes that the historico-political analysis struggles with not the savage (exchanger) as the vector for exchange, but the barbarian as the vector for domination. The savage is a men who exchanges rights; motivated by self-interest in exchange; (195) But the barbarian is 1) historical-someone defined only in the relation to a civilization; 2) dominating-takes and enslaves rather exchanges; 3) free-never trade the freedom for security.
The resistance on the barbarism allows the different discursive tactics/positions/subjects; the coherent, regular, and very tightly woven network to regularize historical knowledge; the tactical reversibility of the discourse (208).
Ten-10 March 1976The historico-political discourse is the process of self-dialecticalization. |
The interesting and fundamental point is the inversion of the problem of war within the discourse of history. It can be called “an internal dialecticalization,” “a self-dialecticalization of historical discourse.” The process of auto-dialecticalization announces the possibility, “the emergence of the idea of an internal war that defends society against threats born of and in its own body (216).”
Though the double definition of the nation, we can understand the process of auto-dialecticalization as the political reworking of the nation; Sieyes’s the Third Estate. The nation have two conditions; 1) formal condition; nation as juridical state; requires law and legislature as formal precondition for the existence of a nation, 2) substantive/historical condition; Works (for us, functions-agriculture, handcraft/industry, trade, liberal arts; Functions (for us, apparatuses-army, justice, church, administration) (129). By absorbing all the functions of the State (236), By the coinciding with the State, a nation is capable of being the nation (221).
Thus, the implication of a self-dialecticalization of historical discourse is; (236) War becomes curtailed. The fundamental relation between nations, groups is no longer domination, but the State. The possibility of a dialectic philosophy of history; it indicates that “History and philosophy began to ask the same question: what is it, in the present, that is the agent of universal? What is it, in the present, that is the truth of the universal? That is the question asked by history. It is also the question asked by philosophy. The dialectic is born (237).”
Eleven -17 march 1976The historico-political discourse reveals the emergence of Biopower and the essence of Racism. |
From anatomo-politics of the human body (the politics of the human body/ the individualizing) to the “biopolitics” of the human race (the politics of human race/ the massifying in the end of 18th) / The emergence of biopower as make live or let die, as the new technology of power over human as a living being.
u Biopolitics
1. Biopolitics is the right to kill or let live; the power of regulation consists in making live and letting die. It assumes the disqualification of death, the disappearance of public ritual of death.
The life and death, A Life is a natural or immediate phenomena. The problem is that the life and death cannot fall outside the field of power, since it involves with the right. It presents that the live or death is a result of the will of the subject who has the right to be alive or the right to be dead.
What the stake in the right of life and death is that; it is always exercised in the unbalanced way (the dissymmetry/disequilibrium of power). In other words, paradoxically, the power on life is exercised only when the power can kill, when the power exercises the right over life; there is no symmetry in the right over life and death. In this sense, we can understand what the Foucault’s speaking meant; “The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill or let live (240).”
Especially, the death is the most private something as well as the specular ceremony in the family, the group, and the whole society. It is a manifestation of a transition from one power to another; “Death is the moment when we make the transition from one power to another. Death is also means the transmission of the power of the dying, and that power is transmitted to those who survived him. (247/248).”
2. Biopolitcs is the body-centred techniques of discipline.
It is to take control over bodies, to increase their productive force, to rationalize and economize the power (as a whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping and reports/ as the disciplinary technology of labor).
3. Biopolitics is the massifying that is directed at human as species.
As the embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques, the new biopower is applied to the living human, to human-as-living-being, to human as species (242). It means that the power tries to rule a multiplicity of human; individual bodies are dissolved into a global mass that is affected by the controlled relation between human beings and their environment.
1) Biopolitcs’s object of knowledge is a set of processes of life and death, that is the medicalization of population; such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on.
2) Biopolitics’s other field of intervention is a set of mechanisms; insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures to address accidents.
3) Boipolitcs concerns with human environment. It includes the controlling over “relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live (245).”
4. New elements (character) with the emergence of biopower
1) The population as new object
As the new technology of power, the biopower deals with not the social body defined by the jurists or the individual-as-body, but “a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted.” The population is the new body. It is a scientific, political, and biological problem and as power’s problem (245).”
2) Characteristics of new emergence treated by biopower
The biopower is collective phenomena that exert their economic and political effects at mass level. It is unpredictable (at the individual level) and displayable (at the collective level) phenomena. It is serial phenomena that occur over a period of time, which have to be studied over a certain period of time.
3) New “security” mechanisms
Biopower have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living being so as to optimize a state of life. It is not disciplined, but regularized.It includes forecasts, statistical estimate, and regulation at mass level. Its aim is to intervene at the level of the generality level, to modify a social homeostasis.
5. Comparison of discipline / biopower in context of demographic explosion. industrialization (249-254)
The discipline and biopower have different times, different registers, and different levels.
-The body-organism-discipline-institutions series
(an organic institutional set, or the organo-discipline of institutions)
-The population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State
(a biological and Statist set, or bioregulation by the State)
Two sets of mechanisms are not in the dichotomy between State and institution. Two sets of mechanisms can be articulated with each other.
There are two examples (250-252).
1) Planned town; the working class, in the disciplinary mechanisms, the spatial layout of town, individuals are made visible and normalized. The regulatory mechanism encourages the savings to buy houses, insurances, hygiene rules, effects on sexuality (rations of female and male, young and old people), child care and education.
2) Sexuality; Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet. It is at intersection of disciplined bodies and regulated population; At the level of body, it is immediately sanctioned by all individual diseases; A child who masturbates too much will be a lifelong invalid; disciplinary sanction. At the level of population, the sexuality involves the theory of degeneracy. It implies that a technical knowledge such as medicine becomes “political intervention-technique” applied to body and population.
Even though the two sets co-exit, there is one element that circulates between the disciplinary and the regulatory. It is the norm. It is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize. The normalizing society is a society intersecting the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation. (253)
6. Paradoxes of biopower
Biopower makes life, but a life that destroys other life. At this point the racism intervenes (254-263).
u Racism
1. Modern Racism as State power mechanism needs to justify violence of biopolitical State. The function of racism is to allow violence to be employed along break in biological field, in continuum of biopower. It is to establish the positive relation between death of others and life of protected group; Not old fashioned military relation of kill or be killed. “The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I-as species rather than individual-can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate (255).”
It means that in a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable (the precondition for exercising the right to kill). Not just direct killing, but the indirect murder of increasing risk of death or exiling someone.
2. The themes of evolutionism; Social Darwinism as biopower doctrine.
Racism develops with colonization, with colonizing genocide. It justifies war as a way of destroying enemy race as a biological threat AND as regenerating own race. (257) It also applies to the criminal, the madness, and various abnormalities; for degenerating races in crime, the mad, the sick etc. (258) The specificity of modern racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and purification of the race. The reason why the most murderous States are the most racist (258).
We know and experience two examples; 1) Nazism 2) Socialist racism; socialism takes over State techniques of capitalism; it makes no critique of biopower, but takes over biopower management of life. Soviet socialist racism/ 19th socialist projects (until era of social democracy and Dreyfus affair) are not racist when considering economic reform, but are racist when considering concrete class struggle.
3. So what are the racism and its significance? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. (254)
The racism remind us of the essential question; “How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem.” The society must be defended.
Conclusion |
War works an analyzer of power relations in the historico-political discourse. It shows that where there is power, there is always resistance (where there is symptom, there is pleasure), and the two things are coextensive (280). Thus, the historical and political discourse is “a matter of establishing a truth that functions as a weapon. For a subject speaking such a discourse, the universal truth and general right are illusions or traps.”(269) It catches the irony or paradox that “War is the cipher of peace.” (268)
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