Thursday, May 14, 2015

ArnoldEyeDavidson. Introduction. Il faut défendre la Société. Picador. 2003.



This volume inaugurates the English-Language publication of Michel Foucault’s extraordinary courses at the Collège de France.
Claude Lévi-Strauss recounts that after he was elected to the Collège de France, an usher, who had grown old in his job, took him from room to room so that he could choose the room in which he would give his yearly course. After Lévi-Strauss had chosen a room the usher bluntly warned him: “Not that one!” to which Lévi-Strauss expressed surprise:

“You see,” [the usher] explained, “it is laid out in such a way that in order to reach the rostrum you have to make your way through the entire audience, and, you have to do likewise while leaving.” “Does it really matter?” I said. Whereupon he shot back this response with a peremptory look: “Someone could speak to you.” I stood by my choice, but, in the tradition of the Collège, it is indeed a matter of the professor dispensing his words, and not receiving them or even exchanging them. (1)

And Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the “mental concentration and nervous tension” involved in giving a course at the Collège de France. (2)
In a 1975 interview Foucault himself noted the strange particularity of “teaching” at the Collège de France, remarking that he liked not having “the impression of teaching, that is, of exercising a relationship of Power with respect to an audience.” (3) The traditional teacher first makes his audience feel guilty for not knowing a certain number of things they should know; [Accurate.] then he places the audience under the obligation to learn the things that he, the professor, knows; [Accurate.] and, finally, when he has taught these things, he will verify that the audience has indeed learned them. [Accurate.] Culpabilisation, obligation, and verification are the series of Power relations exercised by the typical professor. (4) But, as Foucault points out, at the Collège de France, courses are open to anyone who wishes to attend: “If it interests them, he comes; if it doesn’t interest them, he doesn’t come.” (5) At the Collège a professor is paid to present his work, and “it is up to the audience to say or to show whether or not it is interested”:

In any case when I am going to give my courses at the Collège, I have stage fright (trac), absolutely, like when I took exams, because I have the feeling that, really, people, the public, come to verify my work, to show that they are interested or not; if they don’t have an interested look, I am very sad, you know. (6)

Nowhere were culpabilisation, obligation, and verification less present than in Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, and the interested public often gave way to an excited, enthousiastic public that made the very idea of presenting lectures a difficult task. Rather than an atmosphere of sadness, Foucault’s courses produced a kind of frenzy, a frenzy of Knowledge, that was intellectually and socially electrifying.
In an exceptional essay on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze has distinguished two dimensions of Foucault’s writings: on the one hand, the lines of History, the archive, Foucault’s analytic; on the other, the lines of the present, of what is happening now, Foucault’s diagnostic: “In every apparatus, we have to disentangle the lines of the recent past and those of the future at hand.” (7) According to Deleuze, the majority of Foucault’s books establish “a precise archive with exceedingly new historical means,” while in his interviews and conversations, Foucault explicitly confronts the other half of his task, tracing lines of actualisation that “pull us toward a future, toward a becoming.” (8) Analytical strata and diagnostic contemporaneity are two essential poles of Foucault’s entire work. Perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France do we see the balancing, the alternation, and the overlapping of these two poles. At one and the same time, these lectures exhibit Foucault’s relentless erudition and his explosive force, giving further shape to that distinctive History of the present that so changed our twentieth-century landscape.

One of the most emblematic, and often cited, lines of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, La Volonté de savoir, published in 1976, the year of this course, is the trenchant remark “In thought and politicalanalysis we have still not cut off the head of the king.” (9) [Accurate. e.g. PhilipMudd. ChrisCuomo. JamesGray. Soderbergh&Clooney. RobertSMcNamara. CharlieRose.] In studying the historico-political discourse of War in this course, Foucault shows us one way to detach ourselves from the philosophico-juridical discourse of Sovereignty and the Law that has so dominated our thought and political analysis. In an important lecture given in Brasil in 1976, and unfortunately still not translated into English, Foucault underscores his claim that “the West has never had another system of Representation, of Formulation, and of analysis of Power than that of the Law, the system of the Law.” (10) Many of Foucault’s writings, lectures, and interviews of the mid- to late-1970s are responses to this conceptual impasse, are attempts to articulate alternative ways of analysing Power.
Foucault’s concern during this period was both with the Representation of Power and with the actual functioning of Power. The focus of this 1976 course is on one alternative conceptualisation of Power, a mode of thought that analyses Power relations in terms of the model of War, that looks for the principle of intelligibility of Politics in the general form of War. Foucault himsef, discussing the use of the notion of “struggle” in certain political discourse, posed the following question:

[S]hould one, or should one not, analyse these “struggles” as the vicissitudes of a War, should one decipher them according to a grid which would be one of strategy and tactics? Is the relation of forces in the order of Politics a relation of War? Personally, I do not feel myself ready for the moment to respond in a definitive way with a yes or no. (11)

“Society must be defended” is Foucault’s most concentrated and detailed historical examination of the model of War as a grid for analysing Politics.
If this course is an answer to the question of who first thought of Politics as War continued by other means, we must put it in the context of the development of Foucault’s own thought with respect to this substantive claim. If in 1975, just before the lectures published here, Foucault seemed himself to take up the claim that Politics is the continuation of War by other means, (12) by 1976, just after this course, Foucault had subtly but significantly modified his own attitude:

Should one then turn around the formula and say that Politics is War pursued by other means? Perhaps if one wishes always to maintain a difference between War and Politics, one should suggest rather that this multiplicity of force-relations can be coded – in part and never totally – either in the form of “War” or in the form of “Politics”; there would be here two different strategies (but ready to tip over into one another) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, tense force-relations. (13)

As this quotation makes clear, Foucault’s preoccupation with the schema of War was central to his formulation of the strategic model of Power, of force-relations, a strategic model that would allow us to reorient our conception of Power.
Although it is widely recognised that the articulation of this strategic model – with its notions of Force, struggle, War, tactics, strategy, et cetera – is one of the major achievements of Foucault’s thought during this time, the full scope and significance of this model has not been fully appreciated. Although a full study of the emergence of this strategic model in Foucault’s work would have to begin with texts written no later than 1971, (14) his course summary published here leaves no doubt that the examination of the historico-political discourse of War was an essential stage in the formulation of a model of analysis that is presented at greatest length in part 4 of La Volonté de savoir. Rather than trace the changing forms of this model, I want at least to outline a few aspects of it that deserve further attention in the study of Foucault’s writings during this period.
In La Volonté de savoir, Foucault’s strategic model takes as its most central field of application Power relations (and resistances), that is to say, nondiscursive practices or the social field generally. It provides a model of strategic coherence, intelligibility, rationality that answers to what Foucault sometimes called the Logic of strategies. (15) Arrangements of relations of Forces have a strategic intelligibility, and their rationality, as well as the transformation of these arrangements into other coherent arrangements, obeys a Logic distinct both from the Logic of epistemic coherence, obeys a Logic distinct from the Logic of epistemic coherence and transformations studied by Foucault in his archaeological works, and from the Logic of the model of Sovereignty and the law that is the direct object of Foucault’s criticism here.
Although this strategic model is, first of all, intended to provide an alternative system of Representation of the nondiscursive social field, a mode of Representation that does not derive from the juridical conception of Power, in order to assess its significance we must not forget that as early as 1967 Foucault recognised that the form of strategic intelligibility could also be applied to discursive practices. In an unpublished lecture, “Structuralisme et analyse littéraire,” given in Tunisia in 1967, Foucault, invoking among others the name of J.L. Austin, argued that the description of a statement was not complete when one had defined the linguistic structure of the statement, that the analysis of discourse could not be reduced to the combination of elements according to linguistic rules, that therefore “discourse is something that necessarily extends beyond Language.” (16) As he put it in a 1967 letter to Daniel Defert, again appealing to “les analystes anglaises,” “they allow me indeed to see how one can do nonlinguistic analyses of statements. Treat statements in their functioning.” (17) nonlinguistic level of the analysis of discourse is in fact the level of strategic intelligibility.
This model of analysis is developed further in Foucault’s 1974 lectures at the Catholic Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro, “La Vérité et les formes juridiques,” where Foucault urges us to consider the facts of discourse as strategic games.” (18)
Single-page text, “Le Discours ne doit pas être pris comme...,” a text that appears in Dits et écrits just before the course summary of “Society must be defended,” Foucault describes this level of analysis as the political analysis of discourse in which “it is a matter of exhibiting discourse as a strategic field.” (19) Here discourse is characterised as a battle, a struggle, a place and an instrument of confrontation, “a disqualification.” (20) Discourse does not simply express or reproduce already constituted social relations:

Discourse battle and not discourse reflexion ... Discourse – the mere fact of speaking, of employing words, of using the words of others (even if it means returning them), words that the others understand and accept (and, possibly, returns from their side) – this fact is in itself a force. Discourse is, with respect to the relation of Forces, not merely a surface of inscription, but something that brings about effects. (21)

The strategic model of intelligibility, with a Vocabulary one of whose primary sources is the schema of War, applies to the Forces of discourse as well as to nondiscursive Force-relations. (22) In La Volonté de savoir, this form of analysis of discourse is employed in part 4, chapter 2, when Foucault discusses the “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourse,” insisting that discourses should be examined at the two levels of their tactical productivity and of their strategic integration. (23) Indeed, speaking of the perspectival character of Knowledge in a discussion of Nietzsche, Foucault recurs to this same Terminology in order to articulate the Nietzschean claim that “Knowledge is always a certain strategic relation in which man finds himself placed”:

The perspectival character of Knowledge does not derive from Human Nature, but always from the polemical and strategic character of Knowledge. One can speak of the perspectival character of Knowledge because there is a battle and Knowledge is the effect of this battle. (24)

And in his course and his summary of “Society must be defended” Foucault describes the historico-political discourse of War as putting forward a truth that “functions as a weapon,” as speaking of a “perspectival and strategic truth.” Discourse, Knowledge, and Truth, as well as relations of Power, can be understood from within the strategic model. Hence the importance of seeing how this model functions at all of its level of application.
Finally, I want to indicate that this course can be read within the framework of what Foucault called his “circular” project, a project that involves two endeavours that refer back to each other. (25) On the one hand, Foucault wanted to rid us of a juridical Representation of Power, conceived of in terms of Law, prohibition, and Sovereignty, a clearing away that raises the question of how we are to analyse what has taken place in History without the use of this system of Representation. On the other hand, Foucault wanted to carry out a more meticulous historical examination in order to show that in modern Societies, Power has not in fact functioned in the form of Law and Sovereignty, a historical analysis that forces one to find another form of Representation that does not depend on the juridical system.

Therefore, one must, at one and the same time, while giving oneself another theory of Power, form another grid of historical decipherment, and, while looking more closely at an entire historical material, advance little by little toward another conception of Power. (26)

“Society must be defended” participates fully in this historico-theoretical project; it reminds us once again of Foucault’s unrivaled conjunction of philosophical and historical analysis. And these lectures, as in the courses to follow, show us the unfolding of Foucault’s thought in all of its vivacity, intensity, clarity and precision.

I am deeply indebted to Daniel Defert for his help and encouragement, to Michael Denneny and Christina Prestia, who initiated this project at St. Martin’s Press, and to Tim Bent and Julia Pastore, who have followed it through.

1.      Claude Lévi-Strauss, Parole données (Paris: Plon, 1984), p. 9.
2.      Ibid., p. 10.
3.      Michel Foucault, “Radioscopie de Michel Foucault,” in Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, p. 786.
4.      Ibid.
5.      Ibid.
6.      Ibid.
7.      Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” in Michel Foucault, philosophe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989), p. 191.
8.      Ibid, pp. 192-93.
9.      Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité, vol. 1., La Volonté de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 117.
10.   Michel Foucault, “Les Mailles du Pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 4, p. 186.
11.   Michel Foucault,  “L’Œil du Pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 3, p. 206.
12.   Michel Foucault, “La Politique est la continuation de la Guerre par d’autres moyens,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, p. 704.
13.   Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir, p. 123.
14.   See, for example, Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la Généalogie, l’Histoire,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 2. A complete study of this issue must await the publication of Foucault’s 1971 course at the Collège de France, also entitled “La Volonté de Savoir.” The course summary can be found in Dits et écrits, vol. 2. See also Daniel Defert, “Le ‘dispositif de Guerre’ comme analyseur des rapports de Pouvoir,” in Lectures de Michel Foucault: A propos de “Il faut défendre la Société,” ed. Jean-Claude Zancarini (Lyons: ENS Éditions, n.d.).
15.   See, among other texts, Michel Foucault, “Des Supplices aux cellules,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 3, pp. 426-27.
16.   A tape recording of this lecture can be found in the Centre Michel foucault.
17.   Cited in the “Chronologie,” Dits et écrits, vol. 1, p. 31. For further discussion see my essay, “Structures and strategies of discourse: Remarks towards a History of Foucault’s Philosophy of Language,” in Foucault and his interlocutors, ed. Arnold Eye Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
18.   Michel Foucault, “La Vérité et les formes juridiques,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, p. 539.
19.   Michel Foucault, “Le Discours ne doit pas être pris comme...,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 3, p. 123.
20.   Ibid.
21.   Ibid., p. 124.
22.   See also Michel Foucault, “Dialogue sur le Pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 3, p. 465.
23.   Michel Foucault, La Volonté de Savoir, pp. 132-35.
24.   Michel Foucault, “La Vérité et les formes juridiques,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, p. 551.
25.   Michel Foucault, La Volonté de Savoir, pp. 119-20.
26.   Ibid., p. 120.

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