Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker

I

In Foucault’s introduction to Society Must be Defended (1997), the course of lectures he delivered at the College de France between 1975–76, he announces a major shift in his ongoing analysis of power: “Until now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines; for the next five years, it will be war, struggle, the army.”¹ The stated intention is thus to depart from the detailed analysis of disciplinary institutions that he had just presented in Discipline and Punish (1975) in order to engage with a different undercurrent of power. Accordingly, Foucault declares that the course of lectures will be exploring a new proposition; namely, that “Power is war, the continuation of war by other means” (SMD, 16). And as he goes on to explain, this is also to imply that “power relations” in society “are essentially anchored in a certain relationship of force that was established in and through war at a given historical moment [...]” (SMD, 16). On the one hand, then, this new analysis of power is introduced by Foucault as a further development in his work on disciplinary institutions. Society Must be Defended is intended to show that disciplinary power is rooted in political sovereignty, the military, and war. On the other hand, Foucault emphasises that his new analysis will not be limited to looking at particular institutions of sovereignty or the military, for he sees this martial side of power as pervading social life in general: “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” (SMD, 16). Simultaneously, then, Foucault in Society Must be Defended sets up a new approach to power and for the first time posits a new form of generalized power, a form that he proceeds to outline in the lectures as one of “biopolitics.” Thus the shift in analysis does not simply introduce a new genealogical approach to disciplinary power, it is also an attempt to consider how power operates outside institutions and disciplines through wider social networks. And in that sense, Foucault offers the Society Must be Defended lectures as positing a different, “nondisciplinary” dynamics of power. As he goes on to explain, whereas disciplinary power is aimed at individual bodies, biopolitical power suffuses the general processes of life and death for a whole population.

This concern with a more general governance of social life underlies all of Foucault’s writings subsequent to Society Must be Defended. Indeed, by 1978 he was restating his ideas on biopolitics as an interest in “governmentality” in a wider sense.² And by 1983 Foucault was using this notion of biopolitical governmentality as a way of refiguring the overall trajectory of his work:

when one sees what power is, it is the exercise of something one could call government in a very wide sense of the term. One can govern a society, one can govern a group, a community, a family; one can govern a person.... it is governmentality in the wide sense of the term, as the group of relations and techniques which allow these relations of power to be exercised, that is what I studied.³

But such governance is not only the domain of wider social networks. In The History of Sexuality volumes and other contemporaneous writings, Foucault examines ancient Greek and Roman notions of a “government of the self” whereby an individual uses specific techniques of writing to maintain ethical relations with her/his “self’.” How these two strands of governance — individual and social — might relate in a contemporary context is what I want to focus on in this article. My reasons for pursuing the contemporary relation are threefold. First, although Foucault subsequent to Society Must be Defended continues to write on these two strands of governance, he does not outline ways in which they might relate in a modern context. Second, to the extent that the Greek and Roman practices of “self governance” involve specific writing techniques, Foucault locates...