Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power

7/27/2019 Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power

1/22


2/22Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1348831

Ben Golder

158

a work in progress. There are thus, as one commentator on the lectures observes,

reerences to current world events, to books that have recently come into print, and

even to headlines rom the mornings newspaper.1 The ull series o lecture courses

given by Foucault spans the seeming decline o his archaeological method inthe early 1970s, the development o his better-known genealogical investigations

in the middle to late 1970s, and nally his interrogation into the 1980s o the

constitution o subjectivity via the texts o ancient antiquity and early Christianity.

Putting aside or a moment certain ethical considerations pertaining to the use

o this serendipitous Nachlass,2 the lecture courses evidently constitute an invaluableresource or Foucault scholars. They are interesting and useul not simply or their

immediacy and the breadth o their combined coverage, but also or the act

that they allow us to map and to explain shits in Foucaults theoretical positionsand methodologies in the putative silence between his published monographs.

Frequently they supplement and contextualize some o the better-known ormulations

which appear in the books, lectures and interviews; and, more interestingly, in

places they present examples o Foucault revising or contradicting some o the

views expressed in his published work.3 As a result, those lecture courses which

have now been published have generated signicant academic interest indeed,

one recently published monograph on Foucault takes the lecture courses as a point

o departure and deploys them as a means to re-interpret Foucaults work.4 To

date, ve lecture courses have been translated rom French into English: Abnormal(197475), Society Must be Deended (197576), The Hermeneutics o theSubject (198182), Psychiatric Power (197374), and most recently Security,Territory, Population (197778).

My consideration o this last and very welcome addition to Foucaults post-

humously expanding oeuvre proceeds in two parts. In the rst, I oer a summary

1. Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006), p. 2.2. For an interesting discussion o the theoretical issues surrounding the use o the lecture

courses or Foucault scholarship, see Brad Elliott Stone, Deending Society rom theAbnormal: The Archaeology o Bio-Power, Foucault Studies 1 (2004), pp. 7779,http://www.oucault-studies.com/no1/stone.pd [accessed January 29, 2007].

3. Perhaps the best known example o such protable disjunctions between the monographsand the lecture courses is the way in which, in the nal lecture o the course or 197576,Foucault discusses the centrality o state racism to the operation o bio-power, while thisoregrounding o racism is noticeably absent rom the nal chapter oThe History o Sexuality,

Vol. 1, which deals with very similar material. Compare Michel Foucault, Society Must BeDeended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 197576, trans. David Macey (London:Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 23964, with Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The Historyo Sexuality, Vol 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 13559.On racism and bio-power more generally, see the special issue oRadical Philosophy Review7, no. 1 (2004) devoted to the theme o Biopolitics and Racism.

4. Paras, Foucault 2.0, p.2.


3/22

Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power

159

and exegesis o Foucaults arguments in Security, Territory, Population. In sodoing, I aim to contextualize central themes o the lecture course by relating them

to approaches taken up and jettisoned in succeeding work, and by linking them to

the general trajectory o Foucaults thought as a whole (as given expression in hispublished writings). In the second, I propose an interpretation o the lecture course,

a reading o the course as a contribution to the critique o the theological basis o

modern state power. I argue that this genealogical discussion o the historicaldevelopment o the Christian pastorate and its gradual assimilation into modern

state apparatuses constitutes a peculiarly Foucaultian approach to the problematic

o the state, both because it takes as its primary ocus the technologies and modali-

ties opower (rst developed in a Christian context) and because, in the course

o so doing, Foucault oregrounds the possibilities o resistance to, and within, thispastoral-cum-secular modality o state power.

I. The Lecture Course for 197778

Situating the Course

The thirteen lectures given by Foucault or the academic year o 197778 ran rom

January 11, 1978 until April 5, 1978. In terms o the chronology o his annual

courses at the Collge de France, Security, Territory, Population (hereater, STP)thus alls between Society Must be Deended and The Birth o Biopolitics(published in French in 2004 and to be released in English shortly). Society Mustbe Deended proposed a genealogy o the emergence o what Foucault termed therst historico-political discourse on society.5 This discourse, ound in England in

the writings o thinkers such as Coke or Lilburne, and in France in the work o

the aristocratic historian Henri de Boullainvilliers, utilized the concept o war as agrid o intelligibility or power relations in society. In Society Must be Deended,Foucault traced the development o this discourse, with its various deployments and

reworkings, up through the twentieth century to the emergence o a discourse o

biologized state racism. Particularly in its concluding discussion o bio-power, there

is noticeable overlap with several central concerns rom The History o Sexuality,Vol. 1, and we can see Foucault in this period moving beyond the analysis o socialrelations in terms o institutional mechanisms o discipline to a wider, or more

macrosocial, analysis o bio-power.The thematic o bio-power is o course taken up in STP, although as we shall see

it is very quickly subordinated to the more precise investigation o governmentality

and apparatuses o security. This downgrading o the explicit theme o the bio-

5. Foucault, Society Must be Deended, p. 49.


4/22

Ben Golder

160

political is again practiced in the lecture course immediately postdating STP. In TheBirth o Biopolitics, Foucault moves beyond the titular concern with bio-politicsto the real subject o the lecture course, liberalism, understood in genealogical

terms neither as a theory nor as an ideology, but rather as a practice, or as whatFoucault might term a political technology (he looks specically at two variants o

twentieth-century liberal thought: German Ordo-liberalism and the Chicago school

o neo-liberal economics).6STP is thus located at that point in Foucaults researcheswhere, having taken up the theme o bio-politics as a means o extending his earlier

analyses o discipline (and there are several revisionary comments in STP to theeect that the concept o discipline does not suce to explain powers operation

in modernity), he yet realizes that the notion needs supplementing and reworking

rst in the direction o governmentality and apparatuses o security, and thenlater o liberalism as a political technology. Indeed, one o the things which arises

rom a reading oSTP is the act that, despite its popularization by contemporarywriters such as Giorgio Agamben,7 the theme o bio-politics or the bio-political is

really not developed as a stand-alone notion at any great length by Foucault.8

STP may also be situated in relation to some o Foucaults better known books

o this period, coming between the publication o the rst volume o the History oSexuality project (in 1976) and the somewhat delayed publication o the theoreticallyreormulated second and third volumes o the series (both published in 1984). The

lectures are thus delivered at the beginning o one o those commonly remarked

monographic silences (a somewhat loquacious silence, it must be observed,

which is punctuated by maniold lectures, interviews and journalistic interventions)

wherein Foucault, as Beatrice Han notes, seems to have abandoned, or reexamined

6. For the non-French reader, an account o the lecture course can be ound in Colin Gordon,Governmental Rationality: An Introduction, in The Foucault Eect: Studies in Gov-

ernmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: Universityo Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 151, and in Foucaults translated course summary, MichelFoucault, The Birth o Biopolitics, in Essential Works o Foucault 19541984, Vol 1:Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin,1997), pp. 7379.

7. Suce it to say that Agambens deployment o the concept diers markedly rom Foucaults.See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Lie, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 1998), especially pp. 36, 9, 20, 87, 111,11921, 187.

8. While Foucault explicitly discusses bio-power in the nal chapter and lecture o, respectively,The History o Sexuality, Vol. 1 and Society Must be Deended, as well as in some lecturesand interviews at this time, he nevertheless does not ully thematize it. I would argue thatthis is because the concept is a relatively broad and amorphous one, and that (contraTimothy OLeary, who argues that bio-power is conceptually . . . included in the concepto governmentality), Foucault went in search o more historically and socially rened cat-egories, o which governmentality and apparatuses o security represent the rst examples.See Timothy OLeary, Foucault: The Art o Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 178.


5/22


161

and reormed, his previous methods.9STP is situated at the commencement o theparticular hiatus that sees Foucault not only downgrade his avored genealogical

methodology o the 1970s but also re-examine his prior positions on subjectivity. As

he came later to observe, in one o his numerous retrospective sel-assessments:Perhaps Ive insisted too much on the technology o domination andpower. I am more and more interested in the interaction betweenonesel and others, and in the technologies o individual domination,in the mode o action that an individual exercises upon himsel bymeans o the technologies o the sel.10

Now, as Foucault scholars routinely acknowledge, the somewhat crude tripartite

categorization o his work into the archaeological, the genealogical and the ethical

(or, the constitution o subjectivity) phases elides subtle variations within these

approaches, not to mention their possible inter-relation and/or complementarity.11

Suspending those legitimate concerns or a moment, however, and using the division

or limited heuristic purposes, we might say oSTP that it arises at the start oFoucaults ethical turn (or, at least, that it contains the beginnings o such an

approach). But as will be evident rom my ollowing discussion, we are securely

on genealogical terrain here, methodologically. STP is primarily concerned with

the genealogy o power relations, and more specically with the genealogy ostate institutions and practices. However, with the introduction o the concept o

governmentality, we can denitely see lineaments o Foucaults uture thematization

o the government o onesel and o others, which comes to dominate his ethical

writings in the early 1980s. As Foucault wrote in 1982, governmentality is nothing

other than the encounter between the technologies o domination o others and

those o the sel.12 It is thus the meeting point o Foucaults well-known concerns

o the mid-1970s and his later thematization o ethics. Moreover, there is discernible

(or example, towards the end o the seventh lecture) the beginnings o an in-vestigation o the Christian renunciatory hermeneutic o the sel, which orms a

parallel concern, and an exemplary counterpoint, to Foucaults late rehabilitation o

9. Batrice Han, Foucaults Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical,trans. Edward Pile (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 2002), p. 1.

10. Michel Foucault, Technologies o the Sel, in Essential Works o Foucault, Vol 1:Ethics, p. 225.

11. For example, see the classic text by Hubert L. Dreyus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University o Chicago Press,1983), pp. 1046. And o course Foucault claims both archaeological and genealogicalstatus or his late work on ethics and critique; see, or example, Michel Foucault, What isEnlightenment?, trans. Catherine Porter (amended by Robert Hurley), in Essential Workso Foucault, Vol 1: Ethics, pp. 315, 319.

12. Foucault, Technologies o the Sel, p. 225.


6/22

Ben Golder

162

pagan ethics and its contemporary redeployment as an aesthetics o existence. So, in

placing STP within Foucaults intellectual trajectory we can see not only a branchingout rom earlier disciplinary analyses (via the somewhat attenuated theoretical

consideration o bio-politics) but also the indication o an incipient interest in thegovernment o the sel, which will come to orm the basis o his explicit consideration

o ethics in the early 1980s.

The Course Material

STP traces the historical rise o the Christian pastorate as a technology o powerand describes its eventual transposition and transormation into the secular statist

doctrine o the raison dtatin sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.13 Thisis the aspect o the lecture course upon which I ocus in greater depth, below.

However, Foucault begins in the rst three lectures by elucidating historiographical

and methodological questions.14

Foucaults principal concern in the rst three lectures is to articulate the

specicity o apparatuses o security and, more importantly, to distinguish them

rom the concept o discipline which he had developed in the preceding years.15

According to Foucault, what denes a mechanism o security is neither that it

prohibits (per law) nor that it prescribes (per discipline) but rather that it, possibly

making use o some instruments o prescription and prohibition respond[s] to a

reality in such a way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds

nullies it, or limits, checks, or regulates it (p. 47). We begin to see here, and this

signals Foucaults specic interest with modalities o liberalism pursued the ollowing

year in The Birth o Biopolitics, that apparatuses o security work by laissezaire means and rely upon a statistical knowledge which takes the population as

13. As with many o the previous lecture courses, there is much in STP that readers oFoucault will instantly recognize. For a start, the ourth lecture o the series (1 February1978) has been previously published in English as Governmentality, in Michel Foucault,The Foucault Eect, trans. Colin Gordon, pp. 87104. Also, much o the material on thehistorical development o the Christian pastorate, on raison dtatandpolice, was deliveredby Foucault in the orm o public lectures in the United States; see Michel Foucault, ThePolitical Technology o Individuals, in Essential Works o Foucault 19541984, Vol 3:Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 40117; MichelFoucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique o Political Reason, in Essential

Works o Foucault, Vol 3: Power, pp. 298325.14. Compare the rst two lectures oSociety Must be Deended, pp. 141.

15. As the editorial notes to STP inorm us (p. 24), Foucault does distinguish security mechanismsrom disciplinary mechanisms in the nal lecture oSociety Must be Deended (p. 246),but the concept o mechanisms o security is absent rom The History o Sexuality, Vol.1. It is thus in this lecture course that the distinction is made in its clearest and mostcomprehensive terms.


7/22


163

its object. As Foucault puts it neatly, apparatuses o security unction to induce a

progressive sel-cancellation o phenomena by the phenomena themselves. In a way,

they involve the delimitation o phenomena within acceptable limits, rather than the

imposition o a law [or a disciplinary norm] (p. 66).16

So, to take one o Foucaults examples rom the third lecture, while a disciplinary

approach to the problem o disease might entail treating the sick and preventing

contagion among the wider population by orcibly isolating cases o inection, an

approach utilizing apparatuses o security would assume a very dierent aspect.

First, employing statistics, it would seek to calculate the normal expectation, among

the population as a whole, o being aected by the disease or o dying rom it.

Next, it would try to isolate dierent normalities within dierent constituencies

o the population. For example, there might be a higher normal rate o morbidity ormortality among the inhabitants o certain towns, or o dierent regions, or among

those o a certain age or working in a certain proession, and so orth. A security-

based approach to disease management would thus aim to isolate the immanent

regularities o the phenomenon o disease within the population taken as a whole,

next to break down this overall norm into its constituent elements, and then, nally,

to manage the interplay o the dierent normalities in order to achieve an optimum

result. This might involve, or example, specic tailored interventions to arrest the

spread o disease in certain areas, or it could involve leaving other areas or groups

untreated. As Foucault observes in the course o discussing another example, the

circulation o grain and the economic problem o scarcity, apparatuses o security

might unction by allowing prices to rise, allowing scarcity to develop, and letting

people go hungry so as to prevent something else happening, namely the introduction

16. Foucault now makes a point o distinguishing normation rom normalization. Theormer process is said to characterize the operation o disciplinary mechanisms, in whichthere is an originally prescriptive character o the norm and the determination and theidentication o the normal and the abnormal becomes possible in relation to this positednorm (STP, p. 57). The latter process is said to characterize the operation o securitymechanisms and reverses the priority, or at any rate the chronology, o norm and normal.In this process o normalization, Foucault argues, dierent immanent normalities areobserved within the population as a whole and a norm is xed on the basis o thesenormalities: The norm is an interplay o dierential normalities. The normal comes rstand the norm is deduced rom it (STP, p. 63). It seems strange or Foucault, o all people,to argue that the norm could be either simply posited or unproblematically derived romsocial acts when in act what distinguished Foucaults earlier deployment o the term wasits very uncertainontological status; recall or example his discussion o the norm as aregularity that is also a rule in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o thePrison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 179. A hybrid creatureo law and act, neither pure ought nor pure is, the constituent irresolution o thenorm was surely always both less and more than this positivist separation would seeminglyallow.


8/22

Ben Golder

164

o the general scourge o scarcity (p. 45).17 So, as against disciplines interventionist

regulation, apparatuses o security practice a laissez-aire and technocratic management

o phenomena at the level o population itsel.

At this stage it becomes evident that the crucial object upon which apparatuseso security operate, and which had to be constituted in the realm o political knowledge

in order or security apparatuses to unction, is precisely this notion opopulation.Population is not conceived o as a collection o individual juridical subjects within a

determinate territory. Rather, population has a lie and a specic density o its own,

to which the techniques o security must adapt themselves and upon which they must

begin to operate: It is a set o elements in which we can note constants and regulari-

ties even in accidents . . . and with regard to which we can identiy a number o modi-

able variables on which it depends (p. 74). So, Foucault draws a distinction betweenan old notion o government centered upon the actions o a sovereign ruling his

territorial subjects through laws and edicts, to a new notion o the art o govern-

ment, rst discernible in the writings o certain political theorists o the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries, in which the notion o population replaces the concept

o a collection o subjects and the statistical management o variables becomes

the primary technique o governance. Foucault claries the link between what

he has been calling apparatuses o security and what he now, in the ourth lecture,

17. The letting o some suer in order to ensure the survival o others is discussed elsewherein this lecture much more explicitly in terms o a letting die: and it may well be that somepeople die o hunger ater all. But by letting these people die o hunger one will be able tomake scarcity a chimera and prevent it occurring in this massive orm o the scourge typicalo the previous systems. . . . [T]he death o individuals not only does not disappear, it mustnot disappear (STP, p. 42). This discussion obviously mirrors Foucaults discussion, in thenal lecture oSociety Must be Deended,o how [o]nce the State unctions in the bio-power mode, racism alone can justiy the murderous unction o the State (see Foucault,Society Must be Deended, p. 256). Here, in STP, Foucaults analysis is ramed not interms o race and the caesura that race opens up within the body politic (allowing othersto be killed so that some, we, may live), but rather in terms o a caesura between thepertinent level o the population (which is the object o government management andcontrol) and the merely instrumental level o the individual who, accordingly, can besacriced (STP, p. 42). This ormulation recalls Mussolinis joint entry, with GiovanniGentile, in the 1932 Enciclopedia italiana on Fascismo: Anti-individualistic, the Fascistconception o power is or the State; and it is or the individual only in so ar as his interestscoincide with those o the State (quoted in Paul Ginsborg, In the Shadow o Berlusconi,New York Review o Books, Volume 54, no. 1 (2007), p. 50, emphasis in original). To mymind, the notion o racism introduced in Society Must Be Deended, and then promptlydiscontinued as a serious thematic in Foucaults work, represents a more analytically useul(and politically cogent) means or thinking about this notion o the sacrice o individualsto a wider collectivity (population, society, nation, and so orth) than does the double opopulationindividual. On this point, see also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants o Auschwitz:The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books,2002), pp. 8286.


9/22


165

introduces as governmentality population is the target, the political object o

this new modality o power called governmentality, while apparatuses o security

are its essential technical instrument, the technical means by which population

is managed (p. 108). We thus have the series: securitypopulationgovernment(p. 88), as opposed to, say, disciplinesubjectsterritorial sovereignty. So, having

distinguished the notion o an apparatus o security rom his previous conceptualiza-

tion o disciplinary power, and having articulated apparatuses o security with the

concept o governmentality or which they serve as a technique, Foucault then

begins what he calls a history o governmentality (p. 108). And or this, which is

really the abiding preoccupation o the course, he returns (as he will many times in

the uture) to ancient antiquity. Thus, the impelling historical narrative o the course

really begins in the th lecture.Foucault surmises that the historical oundations o present practices o state-

based governmentality (the idea o the government o men as opposed to the

Machiavellian retention o territorial sovereignty) are partly to be ound in the

pre-Christian East, and then later in the Christian East, in the model and organization

o a pastoral type o power. Pastoral power was, Foucault tells us, characterized in

the ollowing way: rst, it was exercised over a fock o people on the move rather

than over a static territory; secondly, it was a undamentally benecent power

according to which the duty o the pastor (to the point o sel-sacrice) was the

salvation o the fock; and nally, it was an individualizing power, in that the pastor

must care or each and every member o the fock singly (see pp. 12530). This

last characteristic, Foucault observes, gives rise to what he calls the paradox o

the shepherd, namely that because the pastor must care or the multiplicity as a

whole while at the same time providing or the particular salvation o each (omneset singulatim), there must necessarily be both a sacrice o one or all, and the

sacrice o all or one, which will be at the absolute heart o the Christian problem-atic o the pastorate (p. 129).

As Foucault indicates here, this paradoxical sacricial logic o the pastoral

orm o power ultimately reaches its ullest elaboration with the institutionalization

o the pastoral modality o power in the (Western) Christian pastorate: Given

this, in the Western world I think the real history o the pastorate as the source o

a specic type o power over men, as a model and matrix o procedures or the

government o men, really only begins with Christianity (pp. 14748). Importantly,

despite the many strategic reversals and contestations over this orm o power, thehistory o the pastorate as a technology o power is a history rom which Western

modernity, despite its secular pretensions, has by no means emerged. Foucault

seeks to emphasize both the continuities and discontinuities amongst and between

three dierent historical orms o the pastorate: the Hebraic/Eastern orm o pastoral-


10/22


11/22


167

pastor exercising a precise and meticulous accounting o the actions o each and all

o his charges in order to assure their salvation. As Foucault observes, [t]he pastor

must really take charge o and observe daily lie in order to orm a never-ending

knowledge o the behavior and conduct o the members o the fock he supervises(p. 181). The pastors concern with the minutiae o the quotidian must also extend

to the spiritual direction [direction de conscience] o the thoughts o his fock aprocedure which involves the production and extraction o a truth which binds one

to the person who directs ones conscience (p. 183). Foucault illustrates a model

o power, then, in which there is a complex (and thoroughly aective) tie between

the pastor who exercises a minute and careul jurisdiction over the bodily actions

and the souls o his fock in order to assure their salvation, and the members o the

fock who each owe him a kind o exhaustive, total, and permanent relationship oindividual obedience (p. 183). The pastorate thus revolves around the notions o

salvation, obedience and truth.

Let me now conclude this section with a brie answer to my second question

o how the Christian pastorate, that art o conducting, directing, leading, guiding,

taking in hand, and manipulating men . . . collectively and individually throughout

their lie and at each moment o their existence (p. 165) developed into modern

orms o governmentality. Foucault is relatively clear that while the Christian

pastorate orms both the background (p. 165) and the prelude (p. 184) to

more recognizably modern orms o government, indeed these latter ormations very

much arise on the basis o it (p. 193), he is nevertheless not describing a massive,

comprehensive transer o pastoral unctions rom Church to state (p. 229). As

Foucault explains in the ninth lecture, there are two parallel processes taking place

in the sixteenth century: rst, there is not a diminution o religious pastoralism but

rather an intensication o the religious pastorate in its spiritual orms . . . [and]

also in its extension and temporal eciency (p. 229); and secondly, we also seea development o orms o the activity o conducting men outside o ecclesiastical

authority. . . . How to conduct onesel, ones children, and ones amily? (p. 230).

This intensication, increase, and general prolieration o this question and o these

techniques o conduct (p. 231) ultimately impinges on the question o sovereignty

such that the political question then becomes: To what extent must whoever exercises

sovereignty now be responsible or the new and specic tasks o the government o

men? (p. 232). Foucaults answer is, in short, that [t]he sovereign is required to

do more than purely and simply exercise his sovereignty, indeed he is orced toresort to something which is both more than sovereignty . . . [and] supplementary

in relation to sovereignty (pp. 23637), and that something is government. This

supplementary excess o government over sovereignty calls or a certain rationality

according to which this government is to be exercised. So, technologies o pastoralism


12/22

Ben Golder

168

multiply, overfow their hitherto strictly ecclesiastical economy, and begin to invest

the eld o political sovereignty. How, then, or according to what rationality, is this

new modality o government to be exercised?

It is at this juncture that Foucault introduces the doctrine oraison dtat, andthrough a reading in lectures nine and ten o sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

theorists oraison dtatsuch as Palazzo, Bacon, Naud and Chemnitz (placed innegative proximity to Machiavelli), he elucidates the circular and immanent logic o

the doctrine: The end oraison dtatis the state itsel, and i there is somethinglike perection, happiness, or elicity, it will only ever be the perection, happiness or

elicity o the state itsel (p. 258). This maintenance o the states orces pursuant

to this new art o government necessitates setting up two major assemblages o

political technology (p. 312). Accordingly, the state is placedin both an externaland an internal eld: rst, what is required externally is the maintenance o the

competitive equilibrium o national power in Europe (discussed in lecture eleven);

and secondly, what is deployed internally is the doctrine o police (discussed in

lecture twelve). In short, through a reading o German writers oPolizeiwissenschatsuch as von Justi, and French theorists o police such as Delamare and Turquet de

Mayerne, Foucault describes how this political technology o police intervenes in the

daily lie o the subjects o a state in everything rom the circulation o goods and

people, to the maintenance o sanitation and health, the guaranteeing o public

security and order, and the construction o inrastructure. In short, police aims at

everything rom being to well-being, everything that may produce this well-being

beyond being, and in such a way that the well-being o individuals is the states

strength (p. 328). Police is the science o internal administration; it is administrative

modernity par excellence (p. 321).

To recap, raison dtat(with its internal mechanism, or assemblage, o police)

is the rationality proper to the art o government which develops in the sixteenthcentury in response to the problematization o sovereignty and the need to devel-

op a governmental supplement (which is in itsel a response to the question o

conduct raised by the Christian pastorate). Ultimately, to continue the theme o

circulation and return, Foucault concludes his historical discussion o the various

metamorphoses o governmentality in the thirteenth and last lecture by discussing the

dissolution oraison dtatand the governmentality o police through the critiqueo the conomistes in the eighteenth century. This brings him back to the discussion

o the dierence between disciplinary mechanisms and mechanisms o securitypursued in the rst three lectures, and we can see how the interventionist, regulatory

and disciplinary modality o power that is the police state is contested, and then

replaced, by a new governmentality which reormulates the notion o population and

deploys scientic knowledges in order to manage its object. This putative conclusion,


13/22


169

o course, is an opening onto the problematic o laissez-aire governance and the

political technology o liberalism engaged in the subsequent lecture course: The Birtho Biopolitics.

II. The Genealogy of Pastoral Power

With such a sweeping historical narrativeit is possible, and tempting, to isolate anynumber o given themes. I shall here restrict mysel to one, and in so doing should

perhaps make clear that my chosen theme does not by any means capture the entirety

o Foucaults expansive enterprise in this lecture course. In STP, Foucault moves,sometimes abruptly, rom a reading o ancient Greek and Hebraic sources to the

texts o early modern political theory and the science o administration, by way oChristian penitential practices, heterodoxies and heresies rom the third century

onwards. There is thus throughout the course an intriguing conjunction o the

political and the religious, and it is this particular conjunction that my reading here

is ocused upon. More specically, in the reading that I pursue in the remainder o

this essay, I propose to locate STP within a theoretical perspective which is devotedto excavating the theological roots (and, by extension, the continuing theological

remnants and dynamics) o the putatively secular political institutions o modernity.

In thus situating Foucault I nevertheless want to make clear how his contribution

diers rom other approaches to this emerging problematic. I argue that what

distinguishes Foucaults approach in this lecture course is his rigorous insistence

on revealing the historico-practicaltheological grounds o modern state power. Heaccomplishes this through a genealogy o the dierent orms in which the state has

entered into the eld o practice and thought (p. 247). In making this critique,

Foucault characteristically ocuses upon questions opower and the way in which

power is exercised by and upon subjects (and increasingly, in the later work, bysubjects upon themselves). Just as importantly, however, he oregrounds the question

oresistance to, and within, this pastoral-cum-state power.In the epigraph rom his aptly titled Political Theology with which I opened

this essay, Carl Schmitt makes a distinction between two approaches to the study

o the signicant concepts o the modern theory o the state. These concepts are

secularized theological concepts, he tells us, not simply by virtue o their theological

heritage but also because o what Schmitt calls their very systematic structure, the

analysis o which is essential to any sociological understanding o the concepts.19

19. For a similar ormulation, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept o the Political, trans. GeorgeSchwab (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1996), p. 42: The juridic ormulas o theomnipotence o the state are, in act, only supercial secularizations o theological ormulaso the omnipotence o God.


14/22

Ben Golder

170

Thus, history and sociology (the latter understood somewhat ormalistically by

Schmitt here as the systematic unctioning o concepts) are presented as two ways

in which we might understand current secular ormations o political modernity as

being underpinned by and imbued with ideas inherited rom theology (and, morespecically, Christian theology). Schmitts distinction does not o course exhaust the

possible avenues o inquiry into the theological bases o secular modernity. In my

discussion below, I look at two dierent contemporary approaches to this question.

The rst approach investigates the theological-philosophical dynamic o some o the

key concepts o modern law and politics, aiming to demonstrate the (productive)

ailure o their claims to secular status (a ailure which reveals a constitutive depen-

dence upon notions o the sacred and upon transcendence). The second approach is

the one Foucault pursues in STP and is ocused upon the analysis o practices andmodalities o power more o this later.

In much o the contemporary theoretical work being carried out on what is

called secular theology there is a ocus upon the ailed philosophical pretensions

o secular modernism to an achieved immanence, to its having eectively banished

rom a proane modern existence all constituent reliance upon transcendent concepts

and thus to its having expelled what Schmitt elegantly calls, in the same work, all

otiose reminiscences o theology.20 The work o Peter Fitzpatrick, or example,

aptly demonstrates the continuance o the sacred (albeit in an altered orm) within

the modern western political imaginary how in act our concepts such as

sovereignty, law and nation depend upon a disavowed theological dynamic even while

laying claim to secular status (the claim to being secular is a discursive condition o

possibility or political action in the liberal public sphere, while the sacred/religious/

theological is relegated to a private sphere o belie). In reerence to the modern

concept o sovereignty, or example, Fitzpatrick (ollowing Derrida) argues convincingly

that despite its claim to being secularized or detheologized through the denial o atranscendent point o reerence, the concept o sovereignty still repeats a theological,

or more precisely, an ontotheological gesture:

So here, says Derrida o sovereignty, you have a concept whichis in principle secularized, but or which the very secularizationmeans the inheritance o a theological memory, and here also wehave a concept still not put into question. That the value osovereignty can be completely secularized and detheologized is a

prospect Derrida doubts. This, in turn, provokes the question owhat is entailed in being partially secularized or detheologized.The short answer to such a question would be that, with modernity,sovereignty is not constituted in a transcendent reerence. Rather, it is

20. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept o Sovereignty, trans.George Schwab (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2005), p. 38.


15/22


171

entirely sel-constituted in what Derrida would call autopositioning, ina complete ipseity. That, o course, goes to conrm sovereignty as neo-deic, the outcome being that the very sovereign claim to subsistspecically yet illimitably in the world becomes the assertion o anontotheology.21

This avenue o analysis thus ocuses upon the philosophical dynamic o

oundational concepts o modern law and politics in an eort to demonstrate how

the theological still inhabits the putatively secular and, more specically, how

the very denial o transcendence requires a pure autopositioning which is, in

Fitzpatricks words, neo-deic. Without the resort to a transcendent ground o

authority, sovereignty must provide that source itsel in an act o sel-positing, a

groundless sel-grounding. Such a philosophical or conceptual approach can bedistinguished rom Foucaults endeavor in STP. Now, the distinction I am drawinghere between an interrogation o the theological-philosophical dynamic o a concept

like sovereignty, and a materialist Foucaultian approach to practices o (pastoral)

power is not meant to imply that the ormer approach is lacking in political purchase

because it is removed rom practices which are constitutive o political reality (or

indeed, on the other hand, that Foucaults approach is somehow atheoretical, or

insuciently philosophical). Nevertheless, there is a qualitative dierence here

which sets Foucaults genealogical methodology apart, and this dierence is very

much refective o the Foucault o the mid-1970s (a period during which he is

preoccupied with practices o power). It is instructive to look at this dierence

through the question o the state as it emerges in Foucaults analysis.

In the years ater the publication oDiscipline and Punish, Foucault was heavilycriticized, primarily by the Marxist Let, or the act that his theorization o power

relations as radically dispersed and as capillary ailed to take adequate account

o more global aggregations o power. Specically, it was argued that a properconsideration o the state apparatus and the states organization and centralization

o violence were conspicuously absent rom Foucaults analysis.22 Hence we see

21. Peter Fitzpatrick, What Are the Gods to Us Now?: Secular Theology and the Modernityo Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8, no. 1 (2006), pp. 161, 1689 (reerences omitted).See also Peter Fitzpatrick, The Triumph o a Departed World: Law, Modernity, and theSacred, in Law and the Sacred, ed. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha MerrillUmphrey (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 2007), pp. 15583. Fitzpatricks interrogation

o secular theology and the opposition between the secular and the sacred is consonantwith themes developed in his earlier work, The Mythology o Modern Law (London:Routledge, 1992), in which modern laws denial o its mythic heredity is itsel revealed asmythic a perected myth o the negation o myth (see especially Chapter One, Mythand the Negation o Law, pp. 112).

22. For example, see Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller(London: Verso, 1980), p. 44.


16/22

Ben Golder

172

Foucault in this period attempt to justiy and explain himsel in interviews. He says,

or example: I dont claim at all that the State apparatus is unimportant, and I

dont want to say that the State isnt important; what I want to say is that relations o

power, and hence the analysis that must be made o them, necessarily extend beyondthe limits o the State.23 Colin Gordon reads STP as in part a reply to Foucaultscritics on this score,24 and he is clearly right. As we shall see, however, Foucaults

treatment o the question o the state is anything but a simple reinsertion o state

apparatuses or a turning outwards, or rather upwards, o his microphysical concerns

towards some cohering entity or locus o power.25 What Foucault proposes to do in

STP is neither to write a history nor a genealogy o the stateper se. Rather, what hedoes is to resituate this object called the state within the eld o a practice called

governmentality, the history o which, as we have seen, is predicated upon theChristian pastorate:

What I would like to show you, and will try to show you, is how theemergence o the state as a undamental political issue can in act besituated within a more general history o governmentality, or, i youlike, in the eld o practices o power. I am well aware that there arethose who say that in talking about power all we do is develop aninternal and circular ontology o power, but I say: Is it not precisely

those who talk o the state, o its history, development, and claims,who elaborate on an entity through history and who develop theontology o this thing that would be the state? What i the state werenothing more than a way o governing? What i the state were nothingmore than a type o governmentality? (pp. 24748)

Foucault again, in his closing comments:

All I wanted to do this year was a little experiment o method in orderto show how starting rom the relatively local and microscopic analysis

o those typical orms o power o the pastorate it was possible,without paradox or contradiction, to return to the general problemso the state, on condition precisely that we [do not make] the state[into] a transcendent reality whose history could be undertaken on thebasis o itsel. It must be possible to do the history o the state on thebasis o mens actual practice, on the basis o what they do and howthey think. (p. 358; punctuation in original)

So, Foucaults little experiment o method consists o him according material

practices o power theoretical priority in a history o the state and o his inserting

23. Michel Foucault, Body/Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and OtherWritings 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 60; MichelFoucault, Truth and Power, in Power/Knowledge, p. 122.

24. Gordon, Governmental Rationality, p. 4.

25. Although see Foucault, The History o Sexuality, Vol 1, p. 99.


17/22


173

the state into a genealogy o governmentality and rationalities o government. And

when he investigates the history o these material practices o government, these

changing rationalities o government, he nds them to be religious in origin. For

Foucault, the institutionalized Christian pastorate underlies the development ogovernmentalities in the modern West, and although he repeatedly stresses that there

are discontinuities, and that pastoral techniques are taken up and redeployed in

dierent ways, nevertheless the pastorate is one o the decisive moments in the

history o power in Western societies (p. 185). What is central or Foucault is the

problem o individualization:

What the history o the pastorate involves, thereore, is the entirehistory o procedures o human individualization in the West. Lets

say also that it involves the history o the subject. . . . [The pastorate is]a prelude to governmentality through the constitution o a specicsubject, o a subject whose merits are analytically identied, who issubjected in continuous networks o obedience, and who is subjectied[subjectiv] through the compulsory extraction o truth. (pp. 1845)

The process o subjectication [assujetissement]through the extract[ion] andproduc[tion o] a truth which binds one to the person who directs ones conscience

(p. 183) is a theme pursued relentlessly by Foucault in the late work. Indeed, rom

the consideration o conession in the rst volume oThe History o Sexuality to thethematization o ethics in the second and third volumes o the project, Foucault is

concerned to go beyond a Christian hermeneutic o the sel which involves at one

and the same time a deciphering o the truth o the sel and a renunciation o the

sel on the basis o the discovered truth.26 It is against this dual decipherment and

renunciation o the truth o what one is that Foucaults later conceptualization

o an aesthetic ethics o existence, a Nietzschean ethics o sel-transgression and

becoming, is counterposed. Here, Foucault links this Christian hermeneutic derivedrom the modality o pastoral power to modern systems o governmentality. This is a

technique o political individualization the production and conduct o governable

identities through the deployment o truth, the truth o the subject that comes

to assume great importance in the organization o Western political systems. In a

way, Foucault argues elsewhere, we can see the state as a modern matrix o indi-

26. See OLeary, Foucault: The Art o Ethics, p. 38.It is not solely a Christian hermeneutic,o course. It is to be ound in other philosophical sources as well. The ethics o asceticismdeveloped in the ourth book o Arthur Schopenhauers The World as Will and Representa-tion, vol. 1, trans. E.J.F Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), which owes conceptualdebts to Buddhism and Vedic philosophy, ollows a similar trajectory a deciphermento our being as part o the metaphysical world will, and a consequent renunciation o thatbeing (denial o the will-to-live). And it is precisely this renunciation that Nietzsche andFoucault will come to renounce in turn.


18/22

Ben Golder

174

vidualization, or a new orm o pastoral power.27 Foucault leaves us much scope

to develop these connections (and in a way such aperus and indicative openings areperhaps what we should expect rom the Collge lectures). One rather obvious way

in which these insights could be developed, or example, would be to assess the wayin which, in the supposedly secular context o twentieth-century communist regimes,

pastoral modalities o conversion, asceticism, sel-fagellation and such were

deployed as modes o subjectication and qualication in the collective.28

And yet all this would hardly be a recognizably Foucaultian engagement with

power i the question o resistance were not also raised, and this is the question

with which I want to close this discussion oSTP. Readers o Foucaults 1970sgenealogical investigations o punitive rationalities and apparatuses o sexuality

will be amiliar with the notion o resistance being inscribed in [power] as anirreducible opposite,29 and with the idea that where there is a power relation

there is always o necessity a resistance to this power, conditioning it, traversing

it, supporting it, and so orth. In lecture eight, Foucault discusses various orms

o resistance to the pastorate, o pastoral counter-conducts, all o which tend to

redistribute, reverse, nulliy, and partially or totally discredit pastoral power in

the systems o salvation, obedience and truth (p. 204). These orms o resistance,

or struggle over the terms o pastoral government, are: the practice o asceticism,

the ormation o communities, the cultivation o mysticism, a return to scripture,

and an embrace o eschatology (pp. 20414). As Foucault stresses, these orms

o resistance to the pastoral conduct o souls are clearly not absolutely external

to Christianity, but are actually border-elements (pp. 21415). They are neither

external to Christianity nor do they aim at a complete overthrowing o relations

o governance tout court. Rather, they try to disrupt the particular alignment ogovernance practiced by the pastorate, along the axis o salvation, obedience, and

truth. For example, asceticism is a challenge to the pastorates emphasis on obedienceto the other, the master. The ascetic excludes a relation o obedience to the other

through the prioritization o the ascetic relation o sel to sel; as Foucault says,

in asceticism there is a specic excess that denies access to an external power

(p. 208). The cultivation o mysticism, on the other hand, challenges the pastorates

political mobilization o truth in mysticism, as Foucault recounts, [t]he soul is

not oered to the other or examination, through a system o conessions [aveux].

27. Foucault, The Subject and Power, p. 335.28. Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault, in Essential Works o Foucault, Vol 3: Power,

p. 251. Foucault briefy touches on the question o the pastoralism o communist regimesin STP, p. 201. For an excellent discussion o subjectication in Stalinist Russia (althoughnot explicitly Foucaultian in orientation), see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind:Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

29. Foucault, The History o Sexuality, Vol 1, p. 96.


19/22


175

In mysticism the soul sees itsel. It sees itsel in God and it sees God in itsel. To

that extent mysticism undamentally, essentially, escapes examination (p. 212).

These orms o resistance to the pastorate all seem to coalesce around the question

o the relationship o sel to sel, the undamental question o the reusal o thecategories o political individualization and the politics o truth upon which the

pastorate, in its openly theological orm and its statist avatars, relies.

Indeed, one o the important aspects o this lecture course is the way in which

it shows Foucault moving rom an understanding o resistance in terms o its being

immanent to power, being inscribed within it, and so orth, to a ocusing o the

problematic o resistance on the question o the truth o the sel (and the political

contestation o this truth). This thinking o resistance poses a concrete challenge

to liberal theories o individual rights, and those orms o resistance to state powerwhich would try to ground resistance in some notion o the individual and what is

due to her, without interrogating the orms o political individualization being relied

upon and mobilized. As Foucault writes in Omnes et Singulatim:

Very signicantly, political criticism has reproached the state withbeing simultaneously a actor or individualization and a totalitarianprinciple. Just to look at nascent state rationality, just to see what itsrst policing project was, makes it clear that, right rom the start, the

state is both individualizing and totalitarian. Opposing the individ-ual and his interest to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with thecommunity and its requirements. Political rationality has grown andimposed itsel all throughout the history o Western societies. It rsttook its stand on the idea o pastoral power, then on that o reason ostate. Its inevitable eects are both individualization and totalization.Liberation can come only rom attacking not just one o these twoeects but political rationalitys very roots.30

Despite the above language o liberation, this is anything but a simple reinscriptiono the liberal subject o right/s. Rather, what Foucault is gesturing towards is a more

risky, anti-oundationalist questioning o the truth o the political subject as she is

daily (re)constituted in political engagement.31

III. Conclusion

I have argued that one o the important tasks which Foucault is trying to accomplish

in this lecture course is an analysis and a bringing to light o the theological grounds

30. Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim, p. 325.31. For a reading along these lines, see Judith Butler, What is Critique? An Essay in Foucaults

Virtue, in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Salih and Judith Butler (Oxord: Blackwell,2004), p. 321.


20/22

Ben Golder

176

o modern practices o power and political subjectivity. Characteristically or

Foucault, this is achieved through a discussion opractices and, crucially, oresistances to these practices. And we must remember that Foucaults genealogy is

itsel a orm o resistance. The critical intention o genealogical analysis, writesMark Poster, is to reveal a dierence in a phenomenon in such a way that it

undermines the sel-certainty o the present without presenting the past as an

alternative.32 I Foucaults later interpretations o ancient Greek and Hellenist eth-

ics have been criticized or their seeming valorization o the past as a solution to the

political ills o the present, nevertheless in STP we have an arresting example o thekind o genealogy or which Foucault was justly amous: an interrogation o, and a

rendering strange o, the limits o the present. This interrogation, carried out in the

later work under the banner o critique or historical ontology, questions thesedimentation o what we are, the accretion o political subjectivities that are given

to us. In revealing the pastoral logic o our purportedly secular political rationality,

Foucaults genealogy in STP moves us to question the conguration o subjectivityand truth, and this is the very movement o critique:

Critique will be the art o voluntary inservitude, o refective indocility.The essential unction o critique would be that o desubjectication inthe game o what one could call, in a word, the politics o truth.33

32. Mark Poster, Foucault and the Tyranny o Greece, in Foucault: A Critical Reader,ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxord: Blackwell, 1986), p. 209.

33. Michel Foucault, What is Critique?, in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-CenturyAnswers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University oCaliornia Press, 1996), p. 386.


21/22


22/22

Ben golderis a Ph.D. Candidate at the Birkbeck College School of Law, University of

London. He is also a Sessional Instructor at NYU-in-London.

shannon hoff

is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies. She

is the author of several articles, including Restoring Antigone to Ethical Life:

Nature and Sexual Difference in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. She is

currently writing on law, justice, and forgiveness in Hegel and contemporary

political philosophy.

riChard a. Jonesis a Lecturer of Philosophy at Howard University, Washington, D.C. His

interests include Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science, particularly

how scientism is politicized and used as a coercive social institution. Currently,

he serves as Co-coordinator for the Radical Philosophy Association.

douglas Kellneris George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy o Education at UCLA. He is author

o many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture, including a trilogy

o books on postmodern theory with Steven Best and a trilogy o books on the

Bush administration, encompassing Grand Thet 2000 (Rowman & Littleeld,2001), From 9/11 to Terror War (Rowman & Littleeld, 2003), and MediaSpectacle and the Crisis o Democracy (Paradigm, 2005). Author o HerbertMarcuse and the Crisis o Marxism (UC Press, 1984), Kellner is editing collectedpapers o Herbert Marcuse, our volumes o which have appeared with Routledge.

Kellners latest book is Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and SchoolShootings rom the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech Massacre(Paradigm, orthcoming).

raChel Walsh

is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Stony Brook University in

New York. She is currently working on her dissertation which examines ethics

and violence in modern and postmodern literatures and lm.

Contributors

Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power

Documents

Transcript of Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power