Society Must Be Defended: Response #1 History as Celebration
By speaking of “Historical Discourse”, Foucault seems to be engaging with something much broader, and altogether different, than our common understanding of “History”. This common understanding - as often coupled with “language” in defining the boundaries of nationhood - seems definitive in its use: history, as in our shared history - something uncontested. But when juxtaposing a general notion of “History” with “My History” or “A History”, a different picture seems to emerge - a picture much more ambiguous, and much less rigid, than the high-school textbooks used to educate our young citizens. We come face to face with Historicity – how ‘a history’ is, rather than how it can be.
The common understanding of history – our narrative – now becomes recognized not as absolute, but as a narration. We can understand our history as constituted as a particular lineage of facts, with each facts situated within a norm (the belief or principles [and they might be the same thing] of which our facts are qualified. It is this double-acceptance, of facts and norms, that seems to enable a group of people to share a conception of particular history – and not only what or who came before, but how we, as a group, became situated in history - or in something that we call our ‘society’. But what brought this acceptance? Was it forced? I posit that there is a play of persuasion - a “soft power” - that is at work within all history – and this power comes to presence/actualizes in the event of celebration.
Read as an expression of force relations/power politics, the topic “historical discourse as a celebration” speaks of history in an instrumental fashion: what is the purpose and merit of celebration? What is the political content of celebration; how is it used in ordering a society? Foucault proposes that traditionally, what constituted history (myths, annals, exploits, stories,) came together for a threefold purpose of articulating, defending, and glorifying the current status of a society. Further, this glorification – the awesome (if not exaggerated) feats of history – could act as the perfect incentive to keep subjects (as they were under the sovereignty of a king) willing to live, sweat and die for a regime: they will never be forgotten; their glory persists in death; their lives become part of a transcending and seemingly permanent power. With this particular kind of history, the power (over others) that came with conquest is archived as glory and divinity (as per the divine guidance or endorsement). The power amassed from conquest becomes stored in History, and from that point, the sovereign is forced to access it through some kind of intermediary. Celebration is an attempt to tie the power of history to the claims of the sovereign, and thus to the sovereign itself.
