Society Must Be Defended: Response #2: The Historical Uncovering of Civil Society.
Foucault engaged in historical analysis to in order to reveal a particular mode of thought (episteme) for a period. An unearthed episteme contains the conditions (beliefs or principles) that enable a particular force relation to obtain between various groups. But while an episteme may contain the conditions of possibility (the norms of a society, the possibilities of action within a system) it does not account for how itself can be affected. What causes a force relation to change? What causes an episteme to be challenged? Foucault does not seem content merely to discover and recount certain facts of history; he wants to understand how a multitude of forces contribute to transforming the episteme of a period. It is a progression of thought that concerns Foucault, and this is reflected in the title he chose for his chair at the College de France: the “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought.” (Gutting 32)
In this brief essay I demonstrate the links between “Historical Analysis”, “The Historical Field of the Nobility”, “The Grid of Intelligibility”, and “The Cognitive-Truth Axis / Discursive-Power Clash”. It is my suggestion that by understanding how these topics relate to each other, in the context of 18th century France, we gain insight into the significance of a “genealogy of knowledge” - that which traces how knowledge develops, how it relates to power, and the effect is has on the episteme of a period.
In the January 21st lecture, Foucault claims a binary structure “runs through society.” (SMBD 51) The structure is that of a sovereign power dominating a subjugated power. The dominant power seeks to retain sovereignty, while the subjugated power retains right and potential for rebellion. The structure is one that can be identified in history because juridical right of the sovereign has always used a language generated by events of conquest. In contrast to Hobbes and the concept of the Leviathan, the war between every man did not disappear when the state institution was formed, but became codified into the state itself.
The uncovering of force relations (through a historical analysis of particular periods) dispels the traditional historical legitimization of sovereignty. Foucault identifies several occasions where such a challenge began to be articulated: it appeared at the end of the civil and religious wars of the 16e century, and at the beginning of the “great political struggles of seventeenth-century England, at the time of the English bourgeois revolution.” (SMBD 49) It was precisely in the seventeenth century, at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in the work of Boulainvilliers, where Foucault finds force relations “existing in both a political and a historical mode, both as a program for political action and as a search for historical knowledge.” (SMBD 109)
Foucault explains this period as a “rearguard struggle waged by the French Aristocracy against the establishment of the great absolute-administrative monarchy.” (SMBD 49) Boulainvilliers, a member of the nobility, was ordered by the sovereign to compile historical knowledge to be used to educated the next king on all relevant matters. Boulainvilliers took this opportunity to order historical discourse in such a way that it spoke nobility’s “demands or misfortunes”. His excavation of “the Historical Field of the Nobility” enabled the “establishment of a new type of historical knowledge,” (SMBD 138) which was “used against the State’s discourse about the state” (SMBD 133). Further, whereas the history of the sovereign had the sovereign as the subject, the history of Boulainvilliers introduced a new “speaking subject” into history. Foucault identifies this moment as the emergence of the voice of the “third estate”, or “civil society”. History was no longer simply narrated to legitimize sovereign power - it was no longer “the history of power as told by power itself”. Rather, it contained history of “a peoples” compiled from the “historical field of the nobility.”
The voice of the civil society, armed with historical knowledge, became an instrument which could be wedged between the sovereign (power) and the administration (knowledge). This force relation demonstrates something exciting: when there is a disconnect of administrative power from knowledge – when a group is able to attack the hinge with attaches power to knowledge – a social differentiation takes place, and allows for the emergence of new kinds of subjects and discourse, complete with “a new domain of objects, a new frame of reference, and a whole field of processes.” (SMBD 134) This is what is meant by a “grid of intelligibility”. The emergence of new discourse is accompanied with a new “grid” which establishes a “certain regime, a certain division between truth and error.” (SMBD 164)
The “Historico-political” field established by Boulainvilliers enabled history (and the society constituted thereupon) to be understood in terms of force relations, with war being the unit of measure. “History that takes as its starting point the fact of war itself and makes its analysis in terms of war can relate all these things – war, religion, economics, politics, manners, characters – and can therefore act as a principle that allows us to understand history…. it is war that makes society intelligible.” (SMBD 163) By exposing force relations, comprehensive social analysis becomes possible, while philosophico-juridical legitimacy of power becomes contestable. Right becomes clarified as a certain relationship that is always underpinned by war. (SMBD 163) Consequently, the idea of sovereign right (by conquest) is unpopular with the masses.
In 1780’s Jacob-Nicolas Moreau was the historiographer of Louis XVI. It was his job to be the scholarly defender of the monarchy whose rights were being attacked in the name of history. The attacks were coming from the Nobility as well as the Parlementarians and the Bourgeoisie. Foucault isolates this moment at when “history became the general discourse of political struggle”, and it was this period in which the ministry of history was created. (SMBD 177) A new coding was taking place: through state intervention, the discourse on history was being integrated in to the practice of the state. As Foucault notes, history is being ordered as an “administrative-type historiography”.
At this point in SMBD Foucault takes a step back to examine what is happening. The history of science is articulated as a disciplinarization of knowledges. But the disciplinarization of knowledge - or rather, what becomes constituted as science - is not an objective account of knowledge. To think otherwise would be to fall prey to the myth of scientism. Foucault identifies a “history of sciences” as located on a cognition-truth axis, from which intelligibility reaches to the demand for truth. But the truth that is accessible only exists along the continuum of a particular grid of intelligibility – it is not an objective or transcendental truth. Science exists to explain certain things along certain grids of intelligibility. The disciplinarization of knowledge experience in the 18th century ought to be understood as a development of “technical knowledge” that presents knowledge as a “multiplicity” (SMBD 180). This is to say that while knowledge became ordered into disparate bodies of technical knowledge, it also lost historical force. Various ‘truths’, belonging to various grids of intelligibility, can exist simultaneously, although they may be unintelligible to each other. Foucault positions a genealogy of knowledge as the field of battle between multiple knowledges.
By tracing knowledge back to the conditions which allowed for it’s intelligibility, one can properly analyse the forces of knowledge at play. The genealogy of knowledge functions along a discourse-power axis, where new knowledge that comes from discourse can transform the fundamental frameworks that underlie traditional knowledge, and the episteme that was with it.
Knowledge can therefore have a transforming effect on the power structures that give rise to it. Governments that claim justification on the basis of a given body of knowledge (for example, history) can be challenged on the basis of those facts (whose historical facts?) Discourse opens a grid of intelligibility which legitimizes what constitutes a ‘fact’, or a fact to be ‘true’ – it opens for new kinds of knowledge, new kinds of facts. These new discourses (for example, economics) can inject new factors into relations of war (economic warfare instead of, or in conjunction with military warfare). Foucault states “Knowledge is never anything more than a weapon in a war.” (SMBD 173) In the case of 18th century France, “Historical knowledge becomes an element of the struggle; it is both a description of struggles and a weapon in the struggle.” (SMBD 172)
