Vincent Le – Entry no. 2 (Foucault)

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault demonstrates that western juridical discourse concealed and reproduced relations of domination by conferring legitimacy, legality and right upon the sovereign’s absolute power and His subjects’ obedience to Him. Foucault suggests that we should, therefore, speak in the unconcealed terms of relations of war, which has three key consequences. Firstly, seeing power relations in so-called ‘peacetime society’ as displaced relations of war means abandoning the idea of the State-leviathan that alone monopolizes war and from above reaps brute force and repression upon the lower levels of society. Rather, we must look at the local, grassroots sites in which the actual power mechanisms are produced, exercised and reproduced by the real micro-agents of war, and are only after appropriated, sublimated and extended by State power apparatuses. For example, Foucault argues that we should not begin with the bourgeois ruling class and downwardly deduce that they repressed madness and infantile onanism for being superfluous in the production and reproduction of labour respectively. For it is just as likely that the bourgeoisie wanted to encourage childhood sexuality to produce an ever-greater labour force. (It must be noted, however, that Foucault proffers no counter-example to why the bourgeoisie would want madness to proliferate, rather than be eliminated for the sake of industrial production…). Instead, we should begin at the micro-levels of the family, the church and the hospital, where parents, priests, doctors and the other real agents of the mechanisms for repressing infantile sexuality and madness reside. It was only later that the ruling class appropriated, not the repression of madness and childhood masturbation as such, but the already existing mechanisms for this repression when it became economically worthwhile for them to do so. While rights and laws are explicit discourses propagated by the great State power apparatuses, such micro-mechanisms of power already function from below in the social fabric as its implicit social norms, unwritten rules and meta-laws. Apropos our earlier discourse on juridical discourse, then, we can see that the state’s legal mechanisms of right and obedience were displaced forms of mechanisms that already existed between regional, warring agents, such as between parents and children, priests and parishioners, teachers and schoolchildren, and husbands and wives. Secondly, seeing such micro-power relations as relations of war means no longer seeing war as existing simply between nation-States in certain isolated spatio-temporalities, which is how war was conceived in the Middle Ages. Rather, it means seeing war as the very fabric of so-called civil society and its sites and institutions of human associations. Power relations in civil society, then, are tied together and sutured by the juridical discourse, civil contracts and human nature; only these are merely the displaced techniques and strategic discourses of a violent, bloody and permanent civil war. Thirdly, speaking in terms of war means refusing to speak in the modality of the scientific discourse that makes claims to be neutral, universal, and hence true. Instead, it requires us to be partisans and take a side, a subjective stance, and a certain perspective on society. By doing so, this discourse of war unveils the way that relations of force constitute truths and true discourses as weapons for reproducing or disrupting the balance between the relations of forces in a certain side’s favour. As such, this impassioned and subjective discourse can always be discredited as fanatical, irrational and delusional by the dominant force that, though having established itself as the absolute law, is no less partisan and perspectival. Even Foucault apparently takes sides with the defeated by exposing how society’s absolute laws are grounded, not upon the truth, but on the victors’ superior force. In doing so, however, Foucault also exposes the defeated’s claims to truth as the likewise exertion of their own subjective, albeit weaker force. Since both the defeated and the victors’ discourses are ultimately perspectival, we have no reason to defend one against the other. Our only possible action is, therefore, inaction, skepticism, agnosticism, pacification—in short a nihilism which sustains the relations of force between the present victors and their subjugated such as they stand today. As such, Foucault’s delegitimization of the victor’s discourse, paradoxically, reinforces this discourse, since in the very same gesture he delegitimizes any grounds for counteracting it.