Troy’s Reviews > Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 > Status Update

Got a little too lost in the historical details for a bit, but now it's intoxicating again.

History, power, knowledge, war, the way the right appropriated race struggle, and the way the State normalizes and accredits and destroys the amateur sciences... all here.

He ends the third section by sketching out the rise of the race theory and it's corresponding race war, which is eventually appropriated to "class war" and which is ALSO appropriated by the State. (The enemy from within.)

From "We have to defend ourselves from society" to "We have to defend society from the other race, which we are bringing into existence."

Again, so current and relevant.

"This discourse is ... asking ... the god of battles to explain the long days of order, labor, peace, and justice. Fury is being asked to explain calm and order."

"Explaining things from below... means... explaining [from] what is most confused, ... most disorderly and most subject to chance, because what is being put forward ... for the interpretation of society ... is the confusion of violence, passions, hatreds... and all the minor incidents that bring about defeats and ensure victories.

So good.
He's talking about the shift from a toughts of the society as a body, to thoughts about binary structures. That is, universalities give way to subjects who fight for their decenered positions; for their own non-universal, but specific rights. This pushes out the millennial drive for "truth." An we see that today, everywhere. Truth is subjective, to a point, or cynically ignored.

Also,I notice that when I'm really reading something, I pull, tug, and roll my hair & leave hair balls everywhere.

Damn. So fantastic & easy to read.
Uh, there are 5 precautions, not 4.
35-6 Is a damn fine summary of Discipline & Power. The next pages are a short analysis of how the bourgeoisie "invented" surveillance.
"We should be looking for a new right that is both antidisciplinary & emancipated from the principle of sovereignty." (40)

His 4 methodological precautions to exploring power are amazing. Esp. his 3rd which is about the individual as created by power. All four are worth contemplating.

BTW, I think it's Foucault's fault that English speaking academics talk shit about science. What Foucault is talking about is not the scientific process, but the shitty atttempt but fields like psychotherapy and economics (and all the social sciences) to claim power by claiming status as "science." Which is bullshit. Science is a process, not a condition.

Foucault has a pretty cool defense of bookish people who would rather spend their time amongst dusty tomes in forgotten libraries. What he wants (to interrogate how power works and operates) is to a) look at forgotten technical expertise and b) singular, localized knowledge. So for example, the plans of prison and factory buildings based on the idea of the panopticon as (a) and the transcripts from prisoners as (b).