Society Must Be Defended: From Sovereignty to Violence
This response is an attempt to situate the final lecture within the course summary for the 1975-76 lectures given at the College du France. These lectures are specifically noteworthy in their tracing of a genealogy of force relations; how the traditional form of power as sovereignty became a decidedly modern biopower.
Lecture 10 ended with the Third Estate emerging as the nation as a totality at the time of the French revolution. From the unification of nations came a ‘universalized’ State, and force relations were therefore reshaped in accordance. Relations are no longer found in terms of domination, as all citizens and groups are now equal in relation to the state (“the fundamental relationship is the State.”)(236)
State power became a relationship of control in regards to the protection and progression of State universality. As such, violence as domination (as it was found between originally between individuals and then between groups) becomes a violence of control (the state control of citizenry). In face of this new dialectic, History (that which traditionally legitimized power) becomes nominal in relation to the Future - or rather, the end result of a progress that stems from the present. But to achieve this progress, society must work through the apparatus of the State to control itself singularly as citizens within the State – as the State ‘population’. This is the origin of biopower – the shaping of man-as-species within the boundaries of the State, according to technologies imposed and directed by the State.
Lecture 11 begins with a distinction of the traditional notion of sovereign power, essentially the power over the life of a subject (“to take life or let live”)(241), and the right of biopower, which is summarized as: “make life and let die.”(241) Since life is the foundation of the sovereign’s right, life must remain outside the contract in a modern State. Modern States must function for the good of its citizenry, and cannot claim ownership over the lives of modern citizens.
The newly constituted modern universalized State, populated by citizens, therefore presents a new grid of intelligibility, in which war - of the historico-political field - has become replaced by a civil struggle that functions towards the universality of the State. This civil struggle happens on a field of intelligibility that we understand as “liberalism”.
Liberalism emerged as a new history that is “polarized towards the present and towards the State” (224) in which the present is the point of “greatest intensity, the solemn moment when the universal makes its entry into the real.” (227) It is the present which carries the opportune moment for the protection and progression of society. This is the essense of progress: ‘progress’ through state intervention; through the States action on man at the level of population. Progress itself is thought of as the culling of undesirable traits and the harvesting of useful traits. By framing undesirable traits as ‘threats’ to the state, the State legitimizes a use of force over the population.
The threat to man-as-species is therefore found not externally, but internally - inside society - inside man himself, in the sense of his ‘citizen-ness’ mode of being. The only way to ameliorate the State is therefore to ameliorate the States unit of measure - man. It is therefore the duty of the State, as a measure of protection and progress, to isolate, diagnose, and treat undesirable biological characteristics of man.
This is essentially what happened in the nineteeth century. “Two types of historical interpretation developed in the nineteenth century: one will be articulated with the class struggle, and the other with a biological confrontation.” (272) In order to legitimize power over citizens (no longer merely subjects) threats to the State were discovered within the State according to racist discourse of division.
Along ethnic lines, certain biologically inferior races present a threat to the State. This is most obviously exemplified in the Nazi movement. But Foucault presents biological racism not only within an ethnic context, but in a characteristic context - as any characteristic weakens the life of a protected group within a population.
The identification of specific traits as undesirable is a fragmenting of life at a biological level. Curiously, it functions according to the same mechanism of racism that Foucault has made use of to characterize struggle in every instance of force relations: racism as what divides a species into conflicting opposites. Different here, is that racism is no longer funtioning at the level of species; it is functioning at the level of ‘man’, as a biological construction, with a multitude of modes of being/thinking.
The threat is therefore not necessarily from a group or individual but rather is a characteristic of man, found within man, and perhaps extending even to ideology, to any philosophy that opposes State practice. As long as an undesired trait can be articulated as a biological threat (including physical health, sexual practice/deviancy, or mental illness) it comes into conflict with State violence - as Foucault asserted in his respective work on sexuality, criminality, and madness. Modern racism is therefore articulated as a state power mechanism used to justify violence to a particular abstract –perhaps we could say a characteristic that is ‘abstracted’ from a ‘biological field’.
No longer between groups (aristocracy and nobility), racism has been internalized biologically, and the new weapons of war are revealed as ‘technologies’ either of the self of the state, but both which seek to shape individuals as biological members of a population. The context in which this shaping takes place is a schema of governance - or rather, govermentality - over a population with the principle purpose of organizing a population in the most desirable manner.
Biopolitical considerations of the population include such things as birth and death rates, illness, education, infrastructure - everything that goes into the structuring and socializing and maintenance of a population. I suppose that it is also from this mode in which we can gain new insights into complex societal problems (if we are to use such categorization/characterization.) Extreme obesity, for example, as a health factor, could be analysed according to social determinants of health, rather than a traditional form of individual diagnosis and treatment.
It is at the level of mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of power, that the transformation (or rather, the emergence and correlation) occurs from a technique of power that were essentially disciplinary and centered on the body of individuals to techniques of power that are non-disciplinary and applicable to man-as-species. This new type of power is called a “massifying” power, and is concerned with the new element of the ‘population’.
Foucault identifies the mechanisms of liberal progress as manifesting through the employment of ‘technologies’ which work to have an effect on the individuals within the fields in which they are operating. A main instrument of biopower is the notion of a norm: a qualification - but more often a quantification according to normalizing tests – of a trait that is desirable, that is socialized into society, and works both on the individual and on the mass. It functions in a way that is similar to another ‘technology’ identified by Foucault - that of ‘panopticism’. Foucault was inspired by the 1785 prison design of the English philsopher and social theorist Jeremy Benthan. The concept of the design enabled an observer to observe all prisoners without the prisoner being able to tell whether or not they were being observed, invoking a kind of omnipresence. Discipline thereby becomes enforced under the constant gaze of the panopticon. For Foucault, panopticism became the notion of creating a felt presence of the State that works to enforce law and norm alike without a physical presence. Therefore space itself becomes imposed with norms, under the watchful eye of the state.
Throughout the SMBD lectures, Foucault is concerned with a general question: can struggle or conflict be analysed in the general form of domination and war? It is sought in every area of conflict, and comes to be found in every mode of relation, to the extreme of a war between abstracts (desirable vs. undesirable traits) within an abstract (the population).
This is a return to a previous lecture in which the inversion of Clauswitz thesis was posited as “politics is war by other means.” If this inversion is accepted, new insight (or legitimacy) is given to struggle, further, biopolitics as a way of ordering population (according to biopower) becomes problematic, because the war has not really been eliminated; domination therefore, and subjugation also must remain. This is the Foucauldian insight on power: it is to be studied on the basis of the relationship itself, not in its relationship to a subjugating power. “We have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects.” (265) By doing so we discover the level at which power functions.
I believe Foucault to be suggesting that individuals ought not to be complicit with society, but to defend their substantial right as an actor on their society - to reactivate war on their own terms, in regard to a personal struggle. War is what divides the entire social body, and it does so “on a permanent basis.” (268) The subject is born in his own shadow. By recognizing that struggle is a condition for the emergence of possibilities, the subject therefore comes face to face with a duty to continue the struggle insofar as he is a citizen rather than a subject under sovereignty. One must therefore act within the present ‘mode of thought’, evoking the penultimate Foucauldian question “who are we?”
