Many European countries have had empires and colonies and in the years since [WWII] have been living in a period they call the “end of Empire”... Certainly, the old symbols have been dismantled: the flags hauled down, the minor royalty dancing with the new black prime minister, the new names on the atlas ... But the attempted continuation of a “world role”, of a global military system, in company with other western powers, and especially the United States, is also a fact of history. What are the new and governing political, economic, military and ideological structures of this new imperialism? - (ed) Raymond Williams

May Day Manifesto 1968, Penguin, 1968

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders... The Third world today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers... So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her ... Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would almost be an obscene caricature. For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man. - Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

*Also see Black Skins: White Masks, 1967

[For Foucault] power is not homogenous but can be defined only by the particular points through which it passes. - Gilles Deleuze

[A] society without power relations can only be an abstraction...[but] to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary, or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. - Michel Foucault

MAY 1968

“Society is a carnivorous flower” Graffiti, Paris, May 1968

“We will claim nothing

We will ask for nothing

We will take

We will occupy”

Graffiti, Paris, May, 1968

“Freedom of Action in School. We Want the Pill. We Want a normal sex life at seventeen”

Teenage school children’s demands, Paris, May 1968

“Mr Minister, you’ve drawn up a report on French youth 600 pages long ... But there isn’t a word about our sexual problems. Why not?”

“I’m quite willing to discuss the matter with responsible people, but you’re clearly not one of them. I myself prefer sport to sexual education. If you have sexual problems, I suggest you jump in the pool.”

“That’s what the Hitler Youth used to say.”

Exchange between leader of 1968 protests, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Minister of Youth and Sports, Francious Missoffe.

Source, French Revolution 1968, Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Penguin, 1968

Big Brother evictee Merlin Luck protests. Photo: Courtesy Channel 10

Silence itself - the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers - is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorised, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. - Foucault

Althusser and Foucault’s theories of relationship between power, knowledge and subjectivity.

THE SUBJECT

· Subjects are constituted through social relations of power, which reproduce themselves through public and private institutions eg. schools, families

· Power does not always entail direct repression of dissent through eg. police, army but is internalized and reproduced through the practices of individuals

HISTORY

· Althusser and Foucault agree that power relations precede our existence and limit our individual agency – we are always already within relations of power.

· But whereas Althusser is interested in deep structures of ideology (its synchronic aspect) Foucault is interested in ideologies (diachronic aspect of power relations) and their contingent character.

THE STATE

· The State remains key to Althusser’s understanding of power – whether in its repressive or ideological forms.

· Foucault argues that power in our societies has become increasingly de-centralised so the category of the State – with its historical baggage of sovereignty – is a blunt instrument for analysis.

“What we need ... is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that still has to be done.” – Foucault

REVOLUTION

· For Althusser revolution is key to liberation from power relations established and reproduced in capitalist societies

· For Foucault the dream of liberation is part of the problem since there is no single point against which to resist power

Foucault - Key Concepts

Epistemology

• There is no such thing as false consciousness – truth and power are inseparable
• Power + Knowledge = discourse.
• Discursive regimes determine what propositions can be accepted as “true” or “false” in any given context.
• Discourse produces rather than falsely or truthfully representing ‘objects of knowledge’.

History

• Genealogy “opposes itself to the search for origins”. Does not trace essences through time such as “man” or “the workers” or “woman”.
• Genealogy is opposed to the idea historical continuity and necessity. It excavates the discontinuities and contingencies that have shaped the present.

Sexuality

“Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a “true sex” in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and its pleasures.” – Foucault

The Body

• Not ‘natural’ but a surface inscribed by regimes of power
• From the eighteenth century in Europe, instead of punishing or killing the body of the criminal, disciplinary power targets the soul in order to render the body ‘docile.’
• Biopower – docile bodies produced through the sciences of population management – health, housing reproduction.

Panopticism and Disciplinary Power

• The panopticon - dream of a transparent society – eradication of the dark and unproductive slums and reformation of the most recalcitrant individuals.
• Production of docile bodies through surveillance of the many by the few.
• Internalisation of the gaze – discipline as self-surveillance.

Politics and Resistance

• Overturns the “repression hypothesis”

If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. – Foucault