Between January and March of 1976, Michel Foucault presented
a series of lecture at the College de France in which he briefly summarizes the
focus of his prior research and introduces the audience to the central themes
that would occupy much his time over the next few years. In Lecture II,
Foucault explains his work from the five preceding years as an investigation
into the triangular relationship between power, truth, and right, and the ways
in which power is established and asserted through discursive productions of
truth. According to Foucault, the dominant lens through which Western society
has understood its own historical evolution and the coercive power of the state
has been the juridico-legalistic theory of sovereignty, which posits a
fundamental Truth, or natural law, on which the state’s sovereign right to
control and coerce the individual is based. Foucault is highly critical of this
understanding of power, and suggests that a more fruitful and emancipatory
understanding of power might be attained through a non-juridical, non-sovereign
theory of right. Foucault’s own proposal is that rather than attempting to
understand power as something originating in a sovereign authority, we should
instead focus on what he calls the “micromechanics” of power—the institutions,
practices, knowledges, and apparatuses through which power is deployed, and
through which subjects are created.
In Lecture III, Foucault begins to explore the possibility
of using war as a schematic framework for analyzing the operations of power on
the level of society and social interactions. In other words, Foucault is
proposing that one possible way of understanding the micromechanics of power
and truth production that would be non-juridical and anti-sovereign would be to
focus on violent struggle, discursive and non-discursive, which is at the root
of all knowledge production and discourses of truth. Foucault suggests that we
use the discourse of war as a strategic schema through which to reorient our
understandings of power.
The main criticism that I have of the Foucault lectures is
that Foucault doesn’t make a clear enough distinction between using the
war-discourse as a metaphor/schema for analyzing the production of truth and
the function of power, and actually adopting the war-discourse as an
explanation for historical developments. This is a very subtle and slippery
distinction, but hopefully I can make it clear by the end of this post. On the
one hand, there are those who would actually explain history as a dichotomous,
binary conflict between the dominant class or ideology and the forces that wish
to see it replaced with something else. Foucault argues that the Jacobins and
the Bolsheviks are two groups who adopted this literalist reading of society as
a continuation of war by other means. The problem with adopting this
antagonistic understanding of social relations is that it always requires an
enemy which must be eliminated. Foucault acknowledges that the end state of
this war discourse is a society turning inward on itself, identifying and purging
the regressive elements that threaten to drag it back to its former state. The
most obvious example of this type of biologico-racial fascism is Nazi Germany,
but there are other, more contemporary manifestations such as the Golden Dawn
party in Greece. It seems like what Foucault needs is a discourse that
recognizes the contingent nature of truth and right, and the extent to which
they are constructed through relations of domination and subjectification (war),
but does not rely upon a binary opposition of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’
In Lecture II, Foucault calls for a non-sovereign,
non-disciplinary theory of right. In light of the problems with the war
discourse identified above, it seems appropriate to amend this formula; if a
new war discourse is to avoid devolving into the fascistic scenario described
above, it will need to be non-sovereign, non-disciplinary, and non-dichotomous
(in the sense of not relying on an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ conception of societal
relations). It seems that Foucault lays the groundwork for such a reinvisioning
of the war discourse in Lecture II, when he describes the radically
decentralized and all-pervasive character of power. If we are committed to
Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz, and we wish to retain his insights into
power relations, then we should begin to analyze the micromechanics of power relations through the conceptual schematic
of war. If we resist the urge to reduce all power conflict to the same binary
opposition between ‘truth’ (on our side) and ‘illusion’ (on their side), and we
remain focused on the apparatuses through which power is asserted and deployed,
such as education, medicalization, and the natural sciences, then we can make
use of the struggle paradigm of truth production without devolving into
paranoid xenophobia and self-righteousness.
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