Society Must Be Defended

* Book: Society Must Be Defended. Michel Foucault.

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Summary

From the Reading Notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:

This book is a transcript of his more lively lectures at the College de France in 1975-76, and deals with power.

The judicial edifice around power in the West was always about royal control, its prerogatives or limits, by those for and against monarchical power. Since the 'middle of the Middle Ages', it used Roman law. The theory of right aimed at providing legitimacy to that power, and to mask 'domination'. It is framed in terms of sovereignty and obedience, and Foucault wants to show how it is about domination and subjugation. He does so by looking at the extremities and margins, where violence is exercised.

His approach is also bottom-up, starting from the daily exercise in a local situation, and so up the chain towards overall domination processes. Who are the concrete agents, what apparatus do they use, these are his questions.

- "An important phenomena occurred in the 17th-18th centuries. A new mechanism of power appeared to be incompatible with sovereignty, which applies to bodies and what they do, rather than to land and what it produces."

It extracted time and labour, rather than commodities and wealth. It was exercised constantly through surveillance rather than periodically through tax and obligation. This non-sovereign power is disciplinary power.

So we have a right of sovereignty, used as justification, with the mechanisms of discipline, concealed by the former. The disciplines used their own discourses and apparatuses of knowledge and norms, rather than law.

Today, with norms invading all fields, resistance uses the language of rights to defend itself against 'norm-alisation', but this is a mistake, says Foucault. We should look to a new right that is not based on sovereignty, and is also anti-disciplinary. What he wants to do then is analyzing relations of domination, and see whether these are based on force, and ultimately, on war. Politics, as a continuation of war, rather than as its Clausewitzian opposite.

Foucault explains this historically: before the acquisition of the power of war by states, war infected the whole social body. It is only the state which cleansed the social body of it, and displaced it to its frontiers (17th-18th cy). At that time, a discourse became important that said that the law was not only born from war, but still suffused with it. "Peace is waging a secret war", peace is a coded war, waiting to be decoded. The discourse is binary (us vs them), and its proponents saw themselves not as universal subjects, but as adventurers of another force (thereby rejecting a universalist tradition that started in Greece). He sees this discourse emerging in 1630 England with the Levellers and the Puritans, then amongst the aristocrats opposing Louis XIV in France, eventually becoming the ideology of a race war.