Notes for Michel Foucault Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76

Key concepts: biopolitics, sovereign.

Related theorists: .

Foreword

INTRODUCTION
Arnold I. Davidson

First English volume of College de France lectures.

(xv) This volume inaugurates the English-language publication of Michel Foucault’s extraordinary courses at the College de France.

21 JANUARY 1976

Compare analysis of operators of domination to epistemological transparency of protocols.

(44-45) The general project, both in previous years and this year, is to try to release or emancipate this analysis of power from three assumptions—of subject, unity, and law—and to bring out, rather than these basic elements of sovereignty, what I would call relations or operators of domination. Rather than deriving powers from sovereignty, we should be extracting operators of domination from relations of power, both historically and empirically. A theory of domination, of dominations, rather than a theory of sovereignty: this means that rather than starting with the subject (or even subjects) and elements that exist prior to the relationship and that can be localized, we begin with the power relationship itself, and see how that relationship itself determines the elements to which it is applied. We should not, therefore, be asking subjects how, why, and by what right they can agree to being subjugated, but showing how actual relations of subjugation manufacture subjects. Our second task should be to reveal relations of domination, and to allow them to assert themselves in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, or their reversibility; we should not be looking for a sort of sovereignty from which powers spring, but showing how the various operators of domination support one another, relate to one another, at how they converge and reinforce one another in some cases, and negate or strive to annul one another in other cases.

Manufacture of subjects rather than genesis of sovereign.

(46) Third and finally, revealing relations of domination rather than the source of sovereignty means this: We do not try to trace their origins back to that which gives them their basic legitimacy. We have to try, on the contrary, to identify the technical instruments that guarantee that they function. . . . The manufacture of subjects rather than the genesis of the sovereign: that is our general theme.

17 MARCH 1976

Biopolitics deals with the population as political problem.

Try viewing governmentality of software like biopolitics, large scale trends versus individual programmers.

(245) Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.

Aleatory and unpredictable individually but displaying constants at the collective level also applies to large scale software projects and businesses; good transition into berry.
(246) They are phenomena that are aleatory and unpredictable when taken in themselves or individually, but which, at the collective level, display constants that are easy, or at least possible, to establish. And they are, finally, phenomena that occur over a period of time, which have to be studied over a certain period of time; they are serial phenomena. The phenomena addressed by biopolitics are, essentially, aleatory events that occur within a population that exits over a period of time.

Security mechanisms have to be established to optimize a state of life, regularizing.

Operations performed in software businesses mirror those of biopolitics.

(246-247) The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. . . . The mortality rate has to be modified or lowered; life expectancy has to be increased; the birth rate has to be stimulated. And most important of all, regulatory mechanisms must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field. In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life. Like disciplinary mechanisms, these mechanisms are designed to maximize and extract forces, but they work in very different ways. Unlike disciplines, they no longer train individuals by working at the level of the body itself. . . . it is, in a word, a matter of taking control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 1997. Print.