I would be interested in this notion of the government of men through/by truth as it is applied to recent events in Spain - a government openly caught in
a lie about the provenance of a terrorist attack is deposed, and an entire people accused of 'caving in to terror'. In Britain and the USA, the question of
the truth about WMD haunts those who are at the inhabit that nexus of human relations that constitutes state power. Have today's evangelists of the
New World Order overlooked the key importance of truth, or are truth and power simply incompatible?
"We speak and the word goes beyond us to consequences and ends which we had
not conceived of" Gadamer
---------- Original Message -----------
From: ColinNGordon@xxxxxxx
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 06:09:45 EST
Subject: Re: (More questions on) power-knowledge
> Clare and friends
>
> wonderful to be able to use our distributed archive to fill some
> publication and memory gaps.
>
> I located my notes on this lecture (9 January 1980). I transcribed
> this passage which ovelaps with Clare's quote.
>
> 'Cette notion de gouvernement des hommes par la vérite, j'en avais
> parlé un petit peu les années precedentes. Ce que veut dire
> élaborer cette notion? Il s'agit par là de déplacer un peu les
> choses par rapport au theme maintenant usagé et rabattu du savoir-
[UTF-8?]> pouvoir�. se débarrasser de la notion de savoir-pouvoir comme on
> s'est débarrassé de la notion d'idéologie dominante.
>
> [I spoke a bit about this notion of the government of men by truth
> in the previous years. What does it mean? It's about shifting things
> around a little in relation to the now rather tired and worn out
[UTF-8?]> theme of knowledge-powerâ?¦. Discarding the notion of knowledge-
> power just as one previously discarded the notion of a dominant ideology.]
>
> Foucault says here and in the following lecture that he is
> interested in a necessary relationship between 'exercise of
> sovereignty' and 'manifestation of truth' (he calls the latter
> 'aletourgia'). He says that aletourgia exceeds or is supplementary
> to knowledge which functions in a purely utilitarian role in
> relation to the exercise of power. However he says that he feels
> unable to give a general account of this relationship and the main
> part of this course addresses manifestation of truth not in relation
> to political sovereignty but in the early Christian doctrine of
> penitence (at the time, I was one of those who found this rather
> frustrating...) . As far as I know he does not return subsequently
> to discuss 'aletourgia', nor how he sees its relation to parrhesia.
> Nor, as far as I know, does he elsewhere give quite the same
> explanation of the benefits of the governmentality perpective or
> make the same explicit comment on its merits as an advance on savoir-
> pouvoir. I am myself sure he did not mean to tell other people who
> find the latter approach useful for their own purposes that they
> should give it up.
>
> The following is a short summary of the lecture in a part my
> Introduction to 'Power' which was omitted from the published text.
> << In the first of his College de France lectures for 1980 [1],
> Foucault recalled how the Roman Emperor Severus had a hall built
> in which he dispensed justice under a ceiling painted to show the
> stars in the sky at the moment of his birth, their disposition
> indicating astrologically the necessity and inevitability of his own
> sovereignty (which had, in the event, been acquired by force).
> Foucault compares Severus with his recent predecessor, Marcus
> Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and proponent of the Stoic view of
> government in which the order of the Empire would be consonant with
> the order of the world.
>
> Through these examples, Foucault identifies an issue which he
> sees as going beyond the mere availability to government of a useful
> knowledge: it concerns, more generally, 'a relation between the
> exercise of power and the manifestation of truth'. This truth, who
> manifestation needs to accompany the exercise of power, goes
> considerably beyond the simple content of knowledges useful to
> government: it contains the notion that a valid governmental hegemony
> (exercise of power) calls for the performance of some form of ritual
> manifestation of a truth. For this notion, adapting a word used by
> the ancient writer Heraklides, Foucault proposes the term
> aletourgia. He cites an example of such a ritual from the early
> modern period in France, in the episode of an expulsion of a
> soothsayer from the royal court.[2] Foucault links this notion to
> the idea of a 'government of men through truth' which he had touched
> in his 1978 and 1979 lecture on governmental rationality, reason of
> state, liberalism and neoliberalism. It contains, he suggests, a
> respect in which the notions of government and governmental rational,
> the 'conduct of men's conduct', now seem to him a more effective
> and satisfactory means of analysis than his earlier notions of power
> and power/knowledge - which he indeed speaks of here, in 1980, as
> needing to be discarded, just as one had previously discarded the
> (Marxist) notion of a dominant ideology.
>
> Foucault went on to cite five widely differing examples of ways
> 'manifestation of truth' and 'government of men' have been thought
> of as conjoined in modern times. The 16th-17th century doctrines of
> raison d'état propose a knowledge of the truth of the state, as the
> object of governmental action; Quesnay and the French économistes
> of the 18th century argue that more truth means less government; as
> government recognises better the truths of economy, it will no
> longer be men who governed, but the nature of things themselves;
> Saint-Simon, in the early nineteenth century, puts forward the
> influential Polytechnician's idea of government as a kind of social
> engineering, capable of achieving its results through a specialised,
> technical expertise ; Rosa Luxembourg calls for a universal
> consciousness-raising [prise de conscience] as the immediate
> instrument for overturning governments, regimes and systems -
> capitalism would not last another 24 hours, if the truth were
> known; Alexander Soljenitsyn holds, conversely, that everyone does
> know the nature of (socialist) power, and the latter survives none
> the less: the power of terror is the power of a naked government,
> showing itself for what it is - not a lie, but the truth.
>
> This discussion of aletourgia advances an important thesis:
> that the acceptability and tenability of government in Western
> culture depends on a criterion more general and polymorphic, and
> therefore only partially or contingently convergent with, the
> particular desiderata of either legitimacy or instrumental savoir.
>
> [1]Tapes of these lectures are held in the archives of the Centre
> Michel Foucault in Paris. To my knowledge, Foucault's discussion of
> aletourgia has never appeared in a published text. His lectures of
> January 1980 are a reworking the commentary on Sophocles' Oedipus
> Rex contained in the 1974 Brazilian lectures reproduced here, and
> which he recalled giving at the Collège de France in around 1971.
> In 1974, the tragedy is interpreted, as we have seen*, as the fall
> of the tyrant who denies the necessary separation of knowledge and
> power; in 1980, while the detail of the analysis is largely the same,
> Foucault finds a slightly different conclusion being reached: the
> necessity to the valid exercise of sovereignty of the manifestation
> of truth.
>
> Foucault gave altogether thirteen annual lecture courses at the
> Collège de France. Tapes and transcripts exist for all but one of
> the courses. The 1976 lectures were published in Italian in 1990 and
> French in early 1997. It was then announced that the other courses
> would appear in further edited volumes at a rate of about one per year.
> [2]Foucault cites on this topic D. Grozynski's paper in Vernant ed.,
> Divination et rationnalité.
>
> * In his 1974 lectures in Brazil, 'Truth and Juridical Forms',
> Foucault gives an introduction to his work of that period on power
> and knowledge through a commentary on a passage in Nietzsche, and on
> Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Foucault draws on the work of his mentor
> Georges Dumézil on the social structure of early Indo-European
> societies, to interpret the drama of Oedipus as enacting the fall of
> a certain model of political power - the rule of the early Greek
> 'tyrant', which Foucault considers a Western offshoot of the
> Assyrian model of kingship in which knowledge (wisdom, expertise)
> and the function of political rule are conceived as an indivisible
> unity. Sophocles' drama, like the philosophy of Plato, is a rebuttal
> of the claim of the ruler to an intrinsic and proprietary form of
> knowledge. Greek philosophy will assert the autonomy of truth from
> power, and affirm the permanent possibility of an external, critical
> challenge to power in the name of truth. In this discussion
> Foucault locates himself within the heritage of Nietzsche, as the
> thinker who breaks with this tradition in Western philosophy by
> rejecting its founding disjunction of power and knowledge as a myth.
> Foucault does not mean by this, as some of his critics have chosen
> to suppose, that power cannot be criticised and that there are no
> intrinsic criteria for establishing claims to know. He is saying,
> rather, that the actual forms of Western politics and Western
> rationality have both, from the time of the Greeks to out own
> present, incorporated features not dreamt of (or at any rate only
> intermittently perceived and investigated) in the pre-Nietzschean
> canon of Western philosophy.
> >>
>
> Colin
>
> In a message dated 19/03/04 03:52:12 GMT Standard Time,
> panoptique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>
> > Subj: Re: (More questions on) power-knowledge
> > Date: 19/03/04 03:52:12 GMT Standard Time
> > From: panoptique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Reply-to: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Sent from the Internet
> >
> >
> >
> > A few days ago Colin Gordon was referring to some comments by
> > Foucault about his use of power-knowledge and governmentality.
> >
> > I have located the passages in question. It is in his lecture of 9
> > January 198o. This lecture has not been published as yet. I found it
> > in the Foucault archives in Paris. It's actually a rather amusing
> > passage in places. He says:
> >
> > 'This notion of the government of men by truth ... Elaborating this
> > notion means displacing things a little in relation to the now
> > overused and worn out theme of power-knowledge. For the history of
> > thought, I had an analysis which was more or less organized, or which
> > revolved around, the notion of dominant ideology. In general, if you
> > like, there are two successive displacements: then, from the notion
> > of dominant ideology to that of power-knowledge and now, a second
> > displacement from the notion of knowledge-power to the notion of
> > government by the truth... Discarding the notion of knowledge-power
> > the same way as I discarded the notion of dominant ideology. Well,
> > when I say that, I am perfectly devastated (detruite) because it is
> > obvious that you don't discard something you thought yourself in the
> > same way as you discard what others have thought. As a consequence I
> > will certainly be more indulgent with the notion of knowledge-power
> > than with that of dominant ideology, but it is up to you to criticize
> > me for that.'
> > --
> > Clare
> > ************************************************
> > Clare O'Farrell
> > email: panoptique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > website: http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au
> > ************************************************
> >
>
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