"Society Must Be Defended"

Our first book club selection was a transcription of an 11 lecture course Michel Foucault gave back in 1976 at the College de France.  I don't know if the course really had an official title, but in any case, the quotation marks are part of the title of the book.  They're meant to convey that it's not M. Foucault who believes society must be defended.  Instead, he traces the history of this concept of society; how would you come to imagine society as something that requires defending?  Who would defend it?  And against whom?

There's quite a few interesting ideas and a lot of good history presented in the lectures.  Foucault has some particularly penetrating analysis of Hobbes idea of the social contract and the way it ends the "war of all against all".  He also outlines the birth of what he calls historicism -- the idea that history is a struggle and the interpretation of history is necessarily a weapon in that struggle -- in 17th century England and 18th century France.  Fortunately, all this is presented in a pretty accessible style.  You don't need to spend much time scratching your head about what in god's holy name he is blathering about.  

Unfortunately, the course doesn't live up to Foucault's idea of what he set out to do.  You can see this best if you compare the 8 page "Course Summary" that appears at the end of the lectures with the course itself.  This summary is a real gem, but it turns out to be more a description of the overall problem that interested Foucault, and which situates what he tried to say.  There's only one page reserved for summarizing what the course actually contained, which, in retrospect, makes the whole class appear a sort of long-winded digression on a particular sub-topic.  

His goal was ultimately to analyze concrete power relations.  To do this, he had to think beyond our typical abstract understanding of how power functions in society, which involves the fiction of a sovereign individual giving up some of their god-given rights in order to form a more perfect union called the State.  In fact, there are all kinds of power at work within society, the field changes all the time, and none of them really operate on the basis of some fabricated contract that creates or transfers "rights".  Foucault calls this type of thinking the juridical model of sovereignty.  While we might think of this today as a type of social contract theory, he points out that it is historically much older, being associated with the old image of the king as a sovereign representation of the social body.

If we're going to avoid this kind of abstract, almost magical, thinking about power, we have to look at real concrete relations of power that are not based on right but on force.  In other words, it seems like we have to take violence and war as our fundamental model of how power works.  If all political power can always ultimately be traced to relations of domination, then it seems like we arrive at an inversion of Clausewitz's famous formula: politics is simply war by other means.  

Foucault summarizes how this is a fairly radical shift in perspective for a number of reasons.  First, it makes power a matter of historical contingency and not juridical inevitability.  The story of power has a history, that of the historical struggles between different factions within a society.  Kings and emperors and social contracts, on the other hand, don't have a real history.  They have a mythical birthplace and an eternal divine right (regardless of whether the divinity in question is some bearded dude or "reason").  Second, since history is real and ongoing, someone has to actually write it, interpret it, produce it.  This production of knowledge is never neutral, but is always itself a weapon in the struggle of history.  In other words, the historian doesn't merely describe, he acts.  Third, this type of thinking changes the form of explanation we give for the political world we find ourselves in.  We no longer try to explain the present by reference to some simple, timeless, and universal principle that makes it seem natural, inevitable, and commonsensical.  Instead, things stand as they do because of a long and convoluted history of real struggles replete with alliances, betrayals, and accidents.  That is, the explanation of the present becomes a lot more complex and obscure.  Finally, as a sort of corollary to these others, the idea that politics is a form of war means that there is a dark violence constantly churning below the superficial appearance of order in our society. 

All of this is very interesting stuff, and probably feels like a very modern perspective on history.  None of it is really discussed at length in Foucault's lectures.  In other words, with one important exception I'll get to presently, he doesn't actually try to show us how our society, today, our politics, is structured by an ongoing war of some sort.  Remember, "society must be defended" is not Foucault's thesis, it is his problem.  So the actual lecture is not devoted to using this framework to explore how power operates concretely today.  The actual lecture is 80% devoted to figuring out where this idea came from historically.  In other words, who was the first to come up with the concept that power is all about war and history is all about struggle?  What is the history of this concept of history?

As I already mentioned, Foucault locates the birth of the idea in two places.  17th century English historians saw their world as structured by the fundamental conflict of the Norman invasion of the Saxons in 1066.  18th century French historians like Boulainvilliers understood their world by reference to the war between a Frankish aristocracy and a Gaulish peasantry.  Most of the class is devoted to examining these contexts, in particular the French one, in considerable detail.  It's interesting history that I am hardly in a position to argue with.  It's also a very complicated story, because Foucault wants to understand not only how this idea of politics as war arose in the context of a particular history, but also how it mutated as it gained currency and became a whole genre, or way of looking at history.  Because, after all, each war has at least two sides and therefore two histories.  And, more importantly, in a world of many real struggles, there will be a history of each one.  Which means that Foucault is most interested in tracing the genealogy of a certain form of history, a form that can serve many ends once it has been invented.

Tracing this complicated genealogy takes up most of his lecture time.  Like I say, it's an interesting story in itself, and Foucault fills it with many interesting digressions (like the one about how Hobbes was not, as is commonly thought, the guy who put war into politics).  But I found myself wishing that he would have shortened this genealogy, which is, after all, just one piece in his broader project.  The takeaway point of it all is really just that this type of history always posits some binary relation of forces that represents society as structured by a struggle between two "nations", or "peoples", or "races".  This last idea -- that placing war into politics ultimately becomes a matter of placing race into politics -- turns out to be the main thesis of the whole course, as well as the point where it touches contemporary political discussion. 

But what exactly does Foucault mean by race?  He uses the term in a deliberately slippery way in this class.  At first, he just means the word to refer to the two sides of any binary structure.  The "us" and the "them" locked in the war we call politics.  For example, the French aristocracy and the peasants.  So it starts off being much more abstract than our modern understanding of race.  A synonym would be "people" or "group".  Foucault's genealogy of this whole way of looking at politics as war is aimed, however, at showing us how the term can gradually morph into the two great State racisms of the 20th century -- the Nazis and Stalinism.   In other words, he asks: how does race become race-ism?  

Unfortunately, he spends only the last two lectures trying to outline this connection, so it remains a bit vague and tenuous.  The connection seems to consist of two parts.  

First, the universalist modern State -- the bourgeois State -- had to get a hold of the idea that it is animated by some sort of internal war.  The way Foucault has told the history, these two concepts should not get along.  The modern State claims to be the universal and inevitable form of political organization.  Its form of sovereignty, and its monopoly on violence, gives it the same structure of juridical justification as the absolute kings of old.  But Foucault's genealogy of politics as war was meant to challenge precisely this juridical and universal concept of political power.  So how was the idea that power is a struggle of races absorbed by the modern universal State?  Foucault's answer to this question is basically "Hegel".  He doesn't literally credit Hegel (in fact, his name is never mentioned) but he claims that the two concepts can be wedded if we adopt the dialectical interpretation of history we associate with Hegel.   The idea is that the sovereign right of the State stems from the institutions of governance that it provides.  Instead of interpreting these institutions as constructed through a historical process though, Hegel conceives them as existing in embryonic form amongst a nation or a people even before there is a formal State.  Actual history, and all the struggles it represents, is just the progressive self-realization of this embryonic form.  This neatly squares the idea of war with that of universality.  History is indeed struggle and opposition, but these only serve to fully give birth to the inevitable and universal that was already latent at the beginning.  

Second, once we have this idea of an internal struggle whose inevitable conclusion is the birth of the State, the State needs to start taking matters into its own hands to hasten the process along.  Like many things "dialectical", this doesn't make that much sense as a historical explanation.  I mean, how does the non-existent State pursue a war to bring itself into being?  Perhaps this is part of why Foucault doesn't give us a detailed history of the State, but spends the final lecture giving us a more abstract theory of how our modern political world is secretly structured by the division and violence internalized by a State that nevertheless still sees itself as universal.  

Here he quickly introduces his two pronged theory of how power operates in our society -- through individual bodily discipline, and through mass biopolitical regularization.  A disciplinary society operates by controlling the individual bodies of its subjects in various ways.  The idea seems to be to describe the techniques of surveillance and control that are implemented at factories, prisons, schools, etc ... in order to organize society.  Foucault mentions this concept only briefly, I think we are presumed to have read his other works on the topic.  Biopolitics is the name he gives to the systems the State sets up to control the social body considered as a statistical aggregate of individuals.  For example, when the State designs various systems of public health for reducing mortality, or for increasing the birth rate, or for insuring against natural disasters, that is biopolitics at work.  Foucault alludes to some quite complicated relationships between these two forms of power, but in this context the distinction isn't actually that important.  Both of these forms of power are ways that the State disciplines and regulates every aspect of life itself.  In effect, they are just fancier French names for Seeing Like A State.   But the concrete operation of these techniques of control are how the idea of an ongoing war creeps back into a universal State.  In trying to control life individually and collectively, the universal modern State begins to posit that some individuals deserve to live more than others, and that for the collective health of the population, certain segments may need to be eliminated.  That is to say that, "society must be defended".  Even though it is universally and inevitably triumphant, it still needs to be defended against any elements that would undermine its discipline and any irregularities that would complicate its trajectory.  As Foucault puts it:

It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States ... What in fact is racism?  It is primarily a way of introducing a brak into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die.  The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and the other, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.

From this vantage point we can finally see why Foucault so belabored the history of the idea that politics is war.  An idea that begins as a real historical war between various groups ends as an internalized war against dissent and irregularity.  Race is the concept that allows for this gradual transformation from a cultural to a biopolitical war, and it is precisely race that gives the "universal" State a concrete power structure.  Foucault clearly sees this racism as a force running through all modern States.  But of course the Nazi obsession with racial purity and the Stalinist obsession with evoloving a stronger people took this logic to its extreme.

After writing this, I can see that the lectures were actually more coherent than they appeared at first.  Understanding the larger problem Foucault was working on helps to clarify which bits are essential and which we should regard more as discursive tangents.  You may still say that it's quite a leap to go from discussions of 18th century aristocratic historians in France directly to Hitler and Stalin.  All I can say is that my faulty exegesis is not (wholly) responsible for this impression; Foucault manages the jump in just a few highly abstract pages.  Maybe we have to come back for the Fall term to get the full story?