Waiting for a bus so here is a true public transport story. As a uni student I lived in the burbs. Went out with friends one night and came home on the train. We stopped half way to walk a friend home...
When we got back to the train station, we had missed the last train. It was about 20 minutes each way to my friends house and we’d miscalculated the time. My house was a long way off.
We couldn’t figure out what to do. It was too far to walk and there were not taxis around. So we set out for a main road
This is the question that begins the fourth lecture in Society Must Be Defended, on January 28th 1976.
MF begins by deflecting a potential misinterpretation of his last lecture (see below). “You might have thought,” he says, “that I was trying to both trace the history of racist discourse AND PRAISE IT.”
So he offers us a useful distinction to show why this isn’t correct. It's a distinction he will explore throughout this lecture. It's the distinction between:
In today’s lecture, Foucault will briefly revisit his discussion of sovereignty from the last lecture, before moving on to the main topic of the lecture series: war. Today we will learn the meaning of the series' title: SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED.
Other topics MF will cover include: the emergence of social war discourses after the Middle Ages. Truth and social war. The mythical nature of social war discourses. 2 types of race war. State racism.
[‘social war’ is my term]
To the lectures…
Foucault begins by saying goodbye. “Last time, we said a sort of farewell to the theory of sovereignty.”
He sums up this theory by focusing on 3 terms: subject, unity, and legitimacy.
1⃣ Sovereign power is constituted by a multiplicity of subjects.
As I see it, today’s lecture covers two main topics:
1⃣ a discussion of methodology in relation to the study of power
2⃣ a discussion of two forms of state power: sovereign power & what Foucualt will later call biopower.
The discussion of sovereign power & biopower might give us a useful way to think about one aspect of our current moment: the pandemic & anti-mask/ anti-lockdown movements. I’ll come back to that. But, for now, to the lecture itself…
Is war a useful model for understanding power?
MF opens his second lecture with this question. He wants to begin—“and to do no more than begin”—exploring whether war can provide a “a principle that can help us understand and analyze political power…”
First lecture. January 7, 1976. It doesn’t begin well. Foucault starts his 1976 lectures by complaining. He gets paid to do RESEARCH, but he’s spending all his time preparing these lectures, which have turned into a ‘circus’.
He is not enjoying the lectures: “…torture is putting it too strongly, boredom is putting it too mildly, so I suppose it [is] somewhere between the two.” So he has decided to move the lectures early in the day this year, in the hope that nobody will turn up.
Moving on, MF tells us that this year’s lectures will bring to a close a series of research projects he has been working on for the past four or five years. “We are making no progress, and it’s all leading nowhere. It’s all repetitive and it doesn’t add up.”
This year, I’ve continued writing about Tibet’s minoritized languages, the ongoing efforts to eliminate them, and the issue of language oppression across the Himalayas and around the world. [thread]
This article looks at how race and language oppression are entangled in Tibet, and lays the groundwork for a raciolinguistic approach to the global language crisis.
This article examines the emergence of a language rights discourse among Tibetans in China, and shows how this discourse works against the interests of Tibetans that sign and speak minoritized languages.