Power, Knowledge, etc.

Prior to leaving on vacation, I submitted this to www.popmatters.com as part of my appeal to join their writing staff. No reply as-yet , and re-reading this thing now, it’s fairly lame, so no surprise, really.

Security, Territory, Population
By Michel Foucault
Palgrave, hardcover

“I must apologize, because I will be more muddled than usual today. I’ve got the flu and don’t feel very well. I was bothered all the same, since I had some misgivings about letting you come here and then telling you at the last minute that you could leave again. So, I will talk for as long as I can, but you must forgive me for the quantity as well as the quality.”

So begins the fifth of thirteen chapters contained in Security, Territory, Population, the latest in a continuing series of texts excavating Michel Foucault’s College De France lectures; it’s an interesting quote for three reasons. First, it’s one of the few personal detours Foucault allows himself herein; second, his illness did not in anyway deter him from delivering a lengthy, thorough address; and third, this reviewer was a year and change past his first birthday and thousands of miles way when the late “archeology of systems of thought” philosopher uttered them, in his native French, on February 8, 1978.

Palgrave’s uniformly handsome hardback editions bring to mind rock, pop, and jazz reissue collections – the Miles Davis deluxe boxes, exhaustive Grateful Dead sets, and so on – that labels trot out to shore up their bottom lines and leave music geeks salivating with anticipation. Anyone with a dog-eared copy of Power/Knowledge molding away in storage can claim a basic understanding of Foucault’s work. Anyone who has plowed through – and absorbed and grasped – Madness & Civilization, Discipline & Punish, both volumes of The History of Sexuality, and myriad other published texts can boast a significantly advanced understanding. Anyone who is snapping up these College De France books as soon as they become available, on Amazon.com or whatever, and desperately gnawing through them – think of ‘em as immaculately produced, vintage live bootlegs with kick-ass liner notes – is a Master’s level Foucault scholar, aspires to be one someday, or totally insane.

This isn’t to condemn Security, Territory, Population, which is mostly concerned with the gradual, incremental evolution of government as we now know it, from the concept of royal sovereignty-cum-dictatorship to a system by and for a given body of people. As ever, Foucault traces events from the 16th and 17th centuries forward as plagues, scarcities, and other population-related issues necessitate the formation of bureaucracies and period social thinkers wrestle with The Little Prince, the many-splendered notion of God as a “shepherd” overseeing his “flock” – and religious leaders serving as terrestrial emissaries, with ever-decreasing relevance – and nation-states shifting from spiritual in purpose to eternally-sustaining entities. In light of U.S. president George W. Bush’s secret and illegal manuevers here and abroad – under the supposed guise of strengthening and protecting “the homeland” – the publication of Security, Territory, Population seems especially timely, as pro-“democracy” neocon thinking collapses into prolonged chaos in Iraq and the U.S. Administration contemplates transforming a Western-hostile Iran. The September 11, 2001 tragedy began a drift, a reversion, back towards a government orchestrated by one man with the assistance of impassive sycophants – a democracy turning into a dictatorship with the professed mission of turning dictatorships into democracies.

Fascinating stuff, and there is more besides in Security, Territory, Population. As a window into the genesis of ideas that would later be developed and eloquently elaborated upon elsewhere, it’s an instructive, revealing document that reenforces the timeless veracity of Foucault’s fabled “power is knowledge is truth” axiom. Yet the getting there itself – and this is true in all entries of this series – will be something of a slog for readers not accustomed to tackling rambling, intellectual tomes. The subject matter isn’t beyond the average educated adult’s comprehension, but the speaker’s tangental or referential detours pile up quickly and threaten at times to lose us completely en route to some overarching point – a failing that Joan Didion’s otherwise excellent Political Fictions shares. This is no fault of the publishers’ or Foucault himself; it would have been dishonest to amend these remarks, and the nature of lectured notes lends itself to meandering. Here my comparison to music breaks down somewhat. Recordings capture audience reaction; the Palgrave books offer no receptive equivalent. It would be interesting to know what Foucault’s students made of his volumnous, footnoted-to-hades-and-back remaks, if they disagreed or felt he didn’t go far enough in his theories – alas.

Worse is that Security, Territory, Population feels no more personally revealing than any of the man’s other interviews, writings, or speeches – which weren’t all that revealing themselves. There is no sense that we are learning anything special about him as an individual – besides the fact that he was as likely as anybody else to get sick and perhaps as determined to do continue to do his job despite the fact of his illness. Ultimately one comes away enlightened, but also a mite queasy, head swimming, reaching for a collection of Garfield cartoons.