"Society Must Be Defended", lectures by Michel Foucault

(longer post)

I've been reading this Michel Foucault lecture series. In them, he reminds the audience that his concept of power has changed since he debuted with his seminal works on madness and punishment. He sees power not so much as represented in instances of repression, but rather a flow or current between actors, a concept better represented as two actors engaged in battle. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explores the concept of war and its historical relation to the role of the nation state and its population's identity.

That Foucault adopts a new concept of power after having written his early works does not devalue them. Foucault's project has not changed: generally, he engages in an archaeological exploration of Western man's conceptual relation to himself and others; specifically, he analyzes how some people engineer and/or assume apparatuses of power used on other people, focusing on the post-Middle Ages emergence of kinds of knowledge and systems of disciplinary power.

In Society Must Be Defended, he begins by asserting that, circa 1600, Europeans began assessing their own history in terms of race and war, whereas previously they self-identified in the person and bloodline of the sovereign and spoke of the Roman history in which they lived. So, what were once mere hiccups within the Roman Empire now signified the coming of the Franks, Gauls, Celts, and so on. The key for Foucault here is not the races or inter-European racism to come, but the idea of (potential) revolution and the political historization of the peopled nation state that emerges and casts itself as the rightful inheritor of sovereignty and greatness, with the distressed and disenfranchised newly identifying themselves as people on the losing end of a historical injustice.

The change in historical perspective is initiated by a shift at the top: the nobility assume power over the education of the monarchy, a role previously held by judges and (accounting) clerks appointed by the sovereign. This education, which centers on history, organizes the past--and, therefore, the present--around "society" rather than royal lineages. And, so it goes, with the nation no longer identified in the body of the king, a new focus on society yields limited concepts of nationalism, race, and class. Of course, society was being narrowly defined around the culture of the previously distressed and disenfranchised nobles (the bourgeoisie, presumably).

Then, yet another shift occurs: a culture with arts, agriculture, trade, and industry becomes a precondition for nationhood. A nation's legitimization is complete once it has a legislature and law. Society no longer just constitutes the nation--it runs it (or, rather, the bourgeoisie runs it, presumably). Finally, with the recognition of society as the bellwether of the nation state, we find institutions of power concerning themselves with the biological phenomena of the social body, thereby giving birth to what Foucault famously calls biopower. Very nice.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault gives a history of Western Europe, recounting legends told from the Middle Ages on and narrating this shift in discourses on power, history, and the State. This narration does get bogged down in details (and more than a little confused), so this lecture series is a difficult read unless you're especially interested.

Notes:

• This shift to a politicized historical discourse coincides with a larger movement re-organizing and, eventually, licensing knowledges.

• Foucault's work usually involves describing some major shift in focus and narrative that followed the Middle Ages. When reading him, I'm often a little disappointed he doesn't spend more time describing the systems being displaced or forgotten. And, as a rule, I'm always a little skeptical when someone argues that something major has changed or some new age is dawning, etc., so this can make Foucault's work hard to square when I find myself needing more information.