Michel Foucault

PHIL 4960.001

Postmodernism

Sep 01, 2005

Society Must Be Defended

• Genealogy of Power

• History as Tool of the Powerful/less

• Rememberance as Trap of the Powerless/ful

• The Reciprocity of Power

• Practice, Belief, & Method

• Disciplinization of Knowledge

[Since the beginning of the 1960’s] with the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses [there has been] a sort of general feeling the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid… [nearest] to us… the facts [of such localized critiques] were also revealing something that could not… have been foreseen from the outset: what might be called the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories… what I mean is--all encompassing and global theories. (SMBD 6)

Local Critiques

Subjugated Knowledge

• “…historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations…” (7)

• What people know: the knowledges that have been disqualified as unmethodical and/or unscientific BUT NONETHELESS STILL THERE and the reappearance of which makes the local critique possible

What was at stake…

in the case of the buried (historical) and disqualified (local) knowledges was “[a] historical knowledge of struggles… the memory of combats… both a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights” (8).

Basically… a genealogical investigation made possible by “… the removal of the tyranny of overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards” (8).

Genealogies…

,,,are therefore not positivistic returns to a form of science that is more attentive or more accurate… [but] quite specifically, antiscience. It is not that they demand the lyrical right to be ignorant, and not that they reject knowledge… They are about the insurrection of knowledges. Not so much against the contents, methods, or concepts of a science; this is above all, primarily, an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours… (9)

Genealogy attempts to…

• Desubjugate and free historical knowledges

• Reactivate local knowledges

• Become the tactic by which archaeological analyses are brought into play against unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse.

“Founding Fathers”

• There is a direct correlation between modernism’s architecture/city planning and the new science/politico-economic movements taking hold in Euro-America after 1700.

• The term “architect” is used to describe the work of foundational thinkers

• Newton is the architect of a new physics

• Jefferson is the architect of independence

• Madison is the architect of the constituion

• God is the architect of the universe

Alexander Hamilton

• Among the various architects of American history, Hamilton stands out for helping to build a strong credit system in the US and the first national banking system

• Also, as first Secretary of the Treasury, for starting the practice of assessing the past history and future potential of diverse industries

Manufacturing Credit

• Hamilton’s 1790 reports to Congress for the creation of a national bank and on the state of US manufacture noted important aspects of control for the government

• A national bank would increase international credit allowing the government to fund emergency military expeditions such as those against the Indians aswell as fight sustained wars against the “great powers” if necessary

• The revamping and retooling of industry would allow the US to be self sufficient in case of war as well as increase market share in world ports

• Greater inroads of progress in the creating of national credit and national industry lead to a greater nation.

Constitutionality of Credit

[It is ] “inherent in the very definition of government… that every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by the force of [that] term, a right to employ all the means requisite” [to succeed].

Alexander HamiltonLetter to George Washington

Concerning the Objections of Jefferson, Madison, & Randolph to a National Bank chartered by Congress

Manufacturing the Future

“Minds of the strongest and most active powers… fall below mediocrity, and labor without effects, if confined to uncongenial pursuits. [But] when all the diffent kinds of industry obtain in a community, each individual can find his proper element, and can call into activity the whole vigor of his nature…”

Alexander HamiltonReport on Manufactures

Presented to Congress, Dec 1791By the Secretary of the Treasury

7 Jan 76

• Juridical & Economic Conceptions of Power

• Power as repression and power as war

• Inversion of Clausewitz’s aphorism: “War is the Continuation of Politics by Other means”

• For Foucault, Politics is the continuation of War

14 Jan ‘76

• War & Power• Philosophy & the

limits of power• Law & Royal Power• Law, Domination, &

Subjugation• Analytics of power:

questions of method

• Theory of sovereignty• Disciplinary power• Rule & Norm

21 Jan ‘76

• Theory of sovereignty & operators of domination

• War as analyzer of power relations

• The binary structure of society

• Historico-Political Discourse, the discourse of perpetual war

• The dialectic & its Codifications

• The discourse of race struggle & its transcriptions