Society Must Be Defended

(43) Lectures by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France proffered in 1975/76 were published in English in 2003 under the title Society Must Be Defended. In these lectures Foucault extended the concept of warfare beyond the use of armed force, beyond limited or total war, or specific theatres or battlefields. His conceptualization occluded neither asymmetric war nor war by means other than the use of armed force; Foucault moved war out from under conventional definitions whereby warfare is inter or intra-statist armed conflict. He provided a more nuanced and abstract (and abstruse) concept of war, one that approaches the “war machine” developed by his contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari.

(44) Foucault’s broadening of the war concept (15–16):

Power is war, the continuation of war by other means. At this point, we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. This would imply three things. First, that power relations, as they function in a society like ours, are essentially anchored in a certain relationship of force that was established in and through war at a given historical moment that can be historically specified. And while it is true that political power puts an end to war and established or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed by the last battle of the war. According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals.

The second implication for Foucault is that political manoeuvring, the geopolitics of oil for example, must be interpreted as a continuation of war. The third implication resulting from Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz’s aphorism is that a “final decision” can come only from the use of armed force. This Apocalyptic scenario sees only actual war as capable of suspending the exercise of power as continuous multi-dimensional, multi-modal warfare. Such a war could do so only by obliterating the societies fighting the “silent war,” the wars in the spheres of activity Putin identified. Would the former Russian president take theoretical issue with Foucault’s concept of war, especially after a US missile defence system with ground facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic is hemming Russia in more tightly than ever?

(45) Foucault addresses education itself in this same lecture series (45–46):

To put it in more concrete terms, we can obviously describe a given society’s school apparatus or its set of educational apparatuses, but I think we can analyze them effectively only if we do not try to derive from them something like the Statist unity of sovereignty. We can analyze them only if we try to see how they interact, how they support one another, and how this apparatus defines a certain number of global strategies on the basis of multiple subjugations (of child to adult, progeny to parents, ignorance to knowledge, apprentice to master, family to administration, and so on). All these mechanisms and operators of domination are the actual plinth of the global apparatus that is the school apparatus. So, if you like, we have to see the structures of power as global strategies that traverse and use local tactics of domination.

Nietzsche said knowledge is always a strategic relationship in which we are placed, and Foucault that knowledge is the effect of battle. Education is a primary knowledge battleground, the definition and determination of knowledge (and reality) the ultimate spoil of war. The West has controlled the definition and determination of knowledge for centuries, placed others (the rest of the world) in a strategic relationship to education and knowledge that has greatly benefited North America and Europe. The Western strategic grip on education and knowledge is lessening however; and as education power is a primary source of subjectivity—and subjectivity (applied human intelligence) the ultimate source of power—Western (US) ability to define and control future global development is lessening.

(46) The term military pedagogy encompasses teaching in a military setting or with a military purpose. A miliary purpose is an object or end to be attained that relates to warfare, defence, military use and armed forces—as opposed to a civil purpose which is an object or end to be attained that relates to the community-at-large, the body politic, or most commonly perhaps, a national state. While most knowledge and education is not directly concerned with military purposes, is not transmitted through the world’s great war colleges for instance, and is valued for its practical application in contemporary civil settings, nonetheless, as this paper has argued, most any knowledge and education can be weaponized if there is the political will to do so. Therefore all pedagogy is military pedagogy to the extent knowledge and education are used as weapons.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 837