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.