Elena on the Sovereignty of Bradley Mannings Act - Agamben on Oath

A ‘criminal’ like Bradley Manning today is a criminal only to the status quo acting against the people’s right to transparency, that is, to know what those in power are doing against human beings no matter in what corner of the Earth. The United States government stands against Manning’s act because his act reveals their actions against other human beings in other parts of the world. With that action Bradley Manning stands as human consciousness beyond national consciousness and in it resides its legitimacy. It must be so in the wake of globalization and consciousness of our selves as human beings.

71

Sacred Substance versus Zone of Indistinction

Agamben draws on Benveniste’s re-interpretation of the Greek term for oath, ὅρκος, horkos,

via ὅρκον ὄμνυμαι, horkon omnumai (to swear an oath, call to witness),

as ‛sacred substance,‛

rather than the traditional etymology in terms of ἕρκος, herkos, which means ‛fence, barrier,

bond,‛ in order to clear the ground of a ‛prejudicial misinterpretation‛ that he says impedes

the archaeology of the oath.72  Benveniste writes that horkos signifies, via his alternate etymo-

logy, ‛not a word or an act, but a thing, the material invested with the malevolent potency

which confers to the promise its binding power.‛73  This would seem to be attested given that

one of the meanings of horkos (Horkos the son of Eris) is ‛the witness of an oath, the power or

object abjured.‛74  Nevertheless,

____________

Agamben wishes to counter the almost-unanimous interpre-

tation according to which the ‛force and efficacy of the oath are sought in the sphere of

magico-religious ‘powers’ to which it belongs in origin and which is presupposed as the most

archaic: they derive from it and decline with the decline of religious faith.‛75  He finds this

unsatisfying since it relies on an ‛imaginary‛ notion of the homo religiosus, a ‛primitive‛ hu-

66

Ibid., 14.

67

Ibid.,

68

Ibid., 16.

69

Ibid.

70

Ibid.

71

Further consideration on this is contained in the ‛What is a Dispositive?‛ article in this issue, especially

Section 1 on ‛Foucault’s Usage of the Concept.‛

72

Ibid., 17.

73

Ibid.

74

Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Abridged Edition, Oxford, Oxford, 1997, (1891), 498.

75

Ibid., 18.

Bussolini: review essay of recent works of Agamben

123

man intimidated by the forces of nature and the divine.  This is unsatisfying because the sour-

ces treated, Agamben points out, present a human who is both religious and irreligious—both

loyal to the oath and capable of perjury.

___________

76  Thus he believes that this traditional explanation is

in need of further exploration, and in particular he wishes to dispel the interpretation in terms

of recourse to a ‛magico-religious sphere.‛

Agamben notes that even scholars as ‛perspicacious‛ as Benveniste and Bickermann

have erred in uncritically repeating the explanation by recourse to the sacred, indicating that

they several times refer to that explanation as one which is ‛always and everywhere‛ given to

account for the oath.77  The problem with this explanation refers back to Agamben’s earlier

work on the sacred (sacer), especially in Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita.  At issue are

the insufficiency and the contradictions of the doctrine of the ‘sacred’ elaborated in the scien-

tific and historical studies of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Much of the

confusion, he says, comes from the encounter and uncritical mixing between the Latin sacer

and the Melanesian concept of mana seized upon by anthropologists.  Citing Robert Henry

Coddington and Max Müller, Agamben indicates that mana became the way in which ‛the

idea of the infinite, of the invisible, and of that which we will later call the divine, can appear

in vague and nebulous terms among the most primitive peoples.‛78  Agamben attributes this

to a lack of historical and interpretive knowledge on the part of the scholars, rather than to any

actually-existing concept or category.  He also points out that, by uncritically joining the con-

cepts (sacer and mana), such commentators failed to pay heed to both contexts of study.

He says that mana pertained to contexts outside the cultural frame of reference of these

European scholars and sacer to contexts beyond their historical knowledge (often, specifically,

as that which was cast as ‛pre-history‛ or ‛pre-law‛ or the like).  As, by the end of the 19th

century and for those seeking to establish a science or history of it, religion in Europe had be-

come something so ‛extraneous and indecipherable,‛ these scholars sought the keys to it in

concepts such as mana.79  They found it easier to assume that the ‛primordial‛ religious con-

texts of Europe must be similar to the ‛magico-religious‛ life of the so-called ‛primitives,‛

thus failing carefully to examine the historically specific genealogy of religion in each context.

Because of this he says that ‛they could not help but to reestablish, as if in a specter, the same

extravagant and contradictory imagination that these scholars had projected.‛80  A more fruit-

ful understanding of the concept, he says, would await the pivotal interpretation of Claude

Levi-Strauss.

Agamben maintains that Levi-Strauss put the understanding of the concept of mana

(and associated ones like orenda and manitou) on new ground because, unencumbered by the

same attachment to the notion of the ‛sacred substance,‛ he was able to recognize the crucial

facet of the concept: its indeterminateness.  Levi-Strauss equates the term to those such as truc

and machin in French (which Agamben renders as coso and affare in Italian)—‛thing‛ and

76

Agamben, Sacramento, 18.

77

Ibid., 19.

78

Ibid., 20.

79

Ibid., 22.

80

Ibid.  He says that the sway of this interpretation was such that it manifests in different ways in the work of

Durkheim, Freud, Rudolf, Otto, and Mauss (page 21).

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 108-143.

124

‛contraption, thingamajig, doohickey, gadget‛ in English—words which, notably, stand in for

something else, or refer to an unspecified quality.  Agamben says they are ‛unknown objects

or objects whose use we can’t explain... a void of meaning or an indeterminate value of signi-

fication... whose sole function is to fill a gap between signifier and signified.‛81  So, rather than

a pervasive magical force, Agamben, following Levi-Strauss, thinks that such concepts have

more to do with an indeterminate, ad hoc, function in language on the part of  anthropologists

and historians of religion.  It is on this basis that Levi-Strauss commented that in the thinking

of the scholars, mana really is mana, implying that there it did function as a pervasive magical

force.

Citing Louis Gernet’s concept of pre-law and Paolo Prodi’s ‛primordial indistinction,‛

________

fuller understanding is given to the ‛ultra-historical fringe‛ as a phase in which law and reli-

gion were indistinct.

________

  The difficult part, says Agamben, is using these concepts in a way that

doesn’t simply involve the simple retrospective projection of current notions of religion and

politics onto this fringe, such that we see it as the simple addition of two parts.  He recom-

mends ‛a type of archeological epoché to suspend, at least provisionally, the attribution of

predicates with which we usually define religion and law.‛82  Instead he’d like to pay heed to

the zone of indistinction between them, trying to understand this as an internal limit that may

give rise to a new interpretation.

As against the interpretations of the oath that distinguish between an ancient religious

rite and a modern inclusion in law,

________

Agamben notes that the oldest documents in our posses-

sion show it to have an unmistakably juridical function, even if also serving religious ones.

83

He says that ‛in the oldest sources the Latin tradition allows us to reach, the oath is a verbal

act destined to guarantee the verity of a promise or an assertion,‛ and that the ‛same goes for

the Greek tradition.‛84  He also reminds us that for the Romans the sacred sphere was con-

sidered an integral part of law.  On the basis of several examples he maintains that

the entire problem of the distinction between the juridical and the religious, in particular for

the oath is, therefore, wrongly put.  Not only do we not have grounds to postulate a pre-

juridical phase in which the oath belonged only to a religious sphere, but perhaps our whole

habitual mode of representing to ourselves the chronological and conceptual relation

between law and religion should be reexamined.

__________

Elena: It’s good to find this unity in religion and the juridical. I think I’ve been looking for it all along! I don’t quite understand his argument against previous researchers on the exclusively religious and mana, it seems that if the oath is indeed both religious and juridical it would not stop the connection with the religious and would in fact presuppose it. “Agamben indicates that mana became the way in which ‛the

idea of the infinite, of the invisible, and of that which we will later call the divine, can appear

in vague and nebulous terms among the most primitive peoples.”

What all that is telling me is that they are both dealing with the dimension of the sacred and the dimension of the juridical and that there is no opposition in that continuity. They are the same “lawfulness” in different dimensions and are ‘connected’ by the human being. In the realm of the sacred, the infinite dimension, ‘world 1’ within each and every human being, in the realm of the juridical, society, the lawfulness with which the individual from his inner connectedness with the ‘divine’ acts in the plane of the earthly: society: the divine divided into multiple human entities acting on each other, ‘climbing’ towards self consciousness. But why? If the human being already possesses the divine within why do we have to ‘climb’ towards its consciousness? Is it a ‘climbing’ or an ‘actualizing’? And then the possibility of ‘failing’, of ‘falling’, in breaking the oath and attracting ‘the malevolent potency’ in the religious sphere and ‘crime’ in the juridical sphere do not contradict each other, on the contrary, they would attest for the fact that the individual commits an act of crime only when he or she “falls” outside of the ‘infinite’ ‘invisible’ ‘divine’ or the ‘whole’ ‘God’. The homo sacer is outside of the law because he has fallen out of the circle and death inflicted on him is ‘lawful’ but when those inflicting death on the homo sacer are themselves outside of the circle killing what is inside the circle, when the status quo is upside down and backwards to lawfulness, then the human being has turned against his and her own integrity and is in a process of destruction. In suicide cults the self-annihilation shows the inability of the people to affirm the process of life and hold to its legitimacy. In the process of unhealthily separating from the rest of mankind, cult members gradually implode: they condemn themselves to the homo sacer status and self annihilate. It is interesting that as a reaction (meaning a mechanical response to the status quo), cults tend to self annihilate although the initial aim is to recover the lost integrity that people perceive in the status quo.

Interesting also that the hero usually stands against a status quo that has turned against the integrity of the whole and privileges a few. The hero re-invokes the whole and calls on the spirit of the people to reinstate it in society overthrowing the status quo. 

All that would bring us back to the circle, the whole. What those in power appropriate is the ‘whole’ represented in the divine authority with which they claim to act in ‘governing’ the people. Their acts are justified because they are supposed to own the sovereignty to exercise, ‘own’ it in their personal qualification: their ‘being’.  ‘Sovereignty’ implies the lawful connectedness with the ‘whole’ ‘God’ and it is what gives legitimacy to the ‘rule’ and its expression in the earthly sphere: the juridical status quo. When those in power lack the consciousness of the whole and appropriate a great deal for themselves against the well being of the many, they are acting without the ‘being’, that is, the consciousness of the whole and consequently, their acts are in themselves, outside of the whole: criminal. “Criminal” is each and every act that is performed outside of consciousness and consciousness is the awareness of the whole. The capacity of the human being to ‘fall’ out of consciousness and act against the ‘whole’ whether it is acting against their own self or that of others is ‘apparently’ what we are here to check! The ‘oath’ would come in as the “intention” to act lawfully and accept ‘punishment’ if unable to. This reminds me of the practice of suicide in high-ranking Japanese culture in which it is legitimate to take one’s life if one has dishonored the sovereignty of ones role.

All these would bring us to further questions on the meaning of life itself. Is life meant to be a process of realizing consciousness? Of walking from one’s self to our selves? That is, from individuality to sociability through one’s work? Is that not education? The preparation to legitimately participate in society through one’s work? Is that not what people are ‘prepared’ for, educated for? At birth, is the human being an individuality with the potential of becoming conscious of ‘the human’ in his own particular reality as much as internalizing and externalizing the reality of all human beings? Is ‘essence’, that is, all that is innately human at birth, the seed of consciousness but only the seed? Is life the road between the ego and the self? “Life”, the social earth on which the individual actualizes the human, the soil on which consciousness is developed through the actualization of the infinite wholeness within every individual in the practice and experience of a lawful life? What is a ‘lawful life’ if not the capacity of the individual to strengthen the whole through his and her life’s work? The ‘community’, NOT the status quo that acts against it but the integrity of the people that co-participate in it. A ‘criminal’ like Bradley Manning today is a criminal only to the status quo acting against the people’s right to transparency, that is, to know what those in power are doing against human beings no matter in what corner of the Earth. The United States government stands against Manning’s act because his act reveals their actions against other human beings in other parts of the world. With that action Bradley Manning stands as human consciousness beyond national consciousness and in it resides its legitimacy. It must be so in the wake of globalization and consciousness of our selves as human beings.

The Obama Budget

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

15 February 11

The Obama Budget: And why the coming debate over spending cuts has nothing to do with reviving the economy.

resident Obama has chosen to fight fire with gasoline.

Republicans want America to believe the economy is still lousy because government is too big, and the way to revive the economy is to cut federal spending. Today (Sunday) Republican Speaker John Boehner even refused to rule out a government shutdown if Republicans don't get the spending cuts they want.

Today (Monday) Obama pours gas on the Republican flame by proposing a 2012 federal budget that cuts the federal deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. About $400 billion of this will come from a five-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending – including all sorts of programs for poor and working-class Americans, such as heating assistance to low-income people and community-service block grants. Most of the rest from additional spending cuts, such as grants to states for water treatment plants and other environmental projects and higher interest charges on federal loans to graduate students.

That means the Great Debate starting this week will be set by Republicans: Does Obama cut enough spending? How much more will he have cut in order to appease Republicans? If they don't get the spending cuts they want, will Tea-Party Republicans demand a shutdown?

Framed this way, the debate invites deficit hawks on both sides of the aisle to criticize Democrats and Republicans alike for failing to take on Social Security and Medicare entitlements. Expect Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairs of Obama's deficit commission, to say the President needs to do more. Expect Alice Rivlin and Paul Ryan, respectively former Clinton hawk and current Republican budget hawk, to tout their plan for chopping Medicare.

It's the wrong debate about the wrong thing at the wrong time.

To official Washington it seems like 1995 all over again, when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich played a game of chicken over cutting the budget deficit, the hawks warned about the perils of giant deficits, and the 1996 general election loomed over all. Washington politicians and the media know this playbook by heart, so it's natural for them to take on the same roles, make the same arguments, and build up to the same showdown over a government shutdown and a climactic presidential election.

But the 1995 playbook is irrelevant. In 1995 the economy was roaring back to life. The recession of 1991 had been caused (as are most recessions) by the Fed raising interest rates too high to ward off inflation. So reversing course was relatively simple. Alan Greenspan and the Fed cut interest rates.

In 2011 most Americans are still in the throes of the Great Recession, which was caused by the bursting of a giant debt bubble. The Fed can't reverse course by cutting interest rates; rates have been near zero for two years.

Big American companies are sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash because there aren't enough customers to buy additional goods and services. The only people with money are the richest 10 percent whose stock portfolios have been roaring back to life, but their spending isn't enough to spur much additional hiring.

The Republican bromide – cut federal spending – is precisely the wrong response to this ongoing crisis, which is more analogous to the Great Depression than to any recent recession. Herbert Hoover responded the same way between 1929 and 1932. Insufficient spending only deepened the Great Depression.

The best way to revive the economy is not to cut the federal deficit right now. It's to put more money into the pockets of average working families. Not until they start spending again big time will companies begin to hire again big time.

Don't cut the government services they rely on – college loans, home heating oil, community services, and the rest. State and local budget cuts are already causing enough pain.

The most direct way to get more money into their pockets is to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (a wage subsidy) all the way up through people earning $50,000, and reduce their income taxes to zero. Taxes on incomes between $50,000 and $90,000 should be cut to 10 percent; between $90,000 and $150,000 to 20 percent; between $150,000 and $250,000 to 30 percent.

And exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes.

Make up the revenues by increasing taxes on incomes between $250,000 to $500,000 to 40 percent; between $500,000 and $5 million, to 50 percent; between $5 million and $15 million, to 60 percent; and anything over $15 million, to 70 percent.

And raise the ceiling on the portion of income subject to payroll taxes to $500,000.

It's called progressive taxation.

The lion's share of America's income and wealth is at the top. Taxing the very rich won't hurt the economy. They spend a much smaller portion of their incomes than everyone else.

Sure – take some steps to cut federal spending over the longer term. Cut the bloated defense budget. Tame the growth in healthcare costs by allowing the federal government to use its bargaining clout - as the nation's biggest purchaser of drugs and hospital services under Medicare and Medicaid and the Veterans Administration – to get low prices. While we're at it, cut agricultural subsidies.

But don't believe for a moment that federal spending cuts anytime soon will get the economy growing soon. They'll have the opposite effect because they'll reduce total demand.

The progressive tax system I've outlined will get the economy growing again. This, in turn, will bring down the ratio of the debt as a proportion of the total economy - the only yardstick of fiscal prudence that counts.

But we can't get to this point – or even to have a debate about it – if Obama allows Republicans to frame the debate as how much federal spending can be cut and how to shrink the deficit.

The President has to reframe the debate around the necessity of average families having enough to spend to get the economy moving again. He needs to remind America this is not 1995 but 2011 - and we're still in a jobs crisis brought on by the bursting of a giant debt bubble and the implosion of total demand.

---

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," "Supercapitalism" and his latest book, "AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

Foucault- The Nature of Discourse

I just found this text and it looks like something worth paying attention to.

Foucault 

The Nature of Discourse 

In order to begin this investigation into the relevance of Foucauldian theory, I believe it is 

important to arrive at a contextual definition of power, which has become a very 

multifaceted expression in the present age. Is power in cyberspace entirely decentralised 

as the utopian camp would have us believe, or is this a myth and in actuality it is held by 

a few companies/institutions? It would appear on the surface that the Internet facilitates 

decentralised power, with all having equal publishing rights and free speech. The 

commonly accepted virtual ideology upholds this utopian view of power as decentralised, 

but we need to look at Foucault here to establish a theoretical framework. Although 

Foucault died of Aids in 1984 his theories of power and discourse provide a ‘vehicle for 

thought’, enabling us to map existing notions onto cyberspace. Through looking at the 

interplay between discourse and ideology, I hope to illuminate a Foucauldian theory of 

power in cyberspace, whilst maintaining a clear direction and sense of purpose. This use 

of Foucault’s method will be self-conscious at every stage in order to provide signposts 

for future research. Before I can bring any Foucauldian logic to bear on cyberspace, we 

first need to look closely at his method of historical study through analysis of discourse.  

Foucault's concept of discourse is an important one for understanding much of his 

thinking on power. According to Foucault discourses are historically situated truths or 

means of specifying knowledge. Power and knowledge are intimately linked together 

through a multiplicity of discursive elements, and ultimately bond in the formation of 

discourse.  

“We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can 

be both an instrument and an effect of power… Discourse transmits and produces power; 

it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it 

possible to thwart it… there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within 

the same strategy…” (Foucault, 1990, 101)  

At the same time as producing power, discourse is also produced by it, as legitimating 

discourses produce counter discourses attacking the same validation. That is to say, for 

every discourse there is an alternative reading. Foucault states that there can be no power 

without resistance, as counter discourses produce new knowledge and ways of thinking. 

Thus ‘truth’ is never an absolute, as it is constituted through discourse. By means of an 

example one might consider the recent feminist thinking that has contested the stability of 

the categories of sex and gender. Within the strategy of Feminism there exist multiple 

discourses approaching the problem of equality from different perspectives. 

“The theory that bodies are not biological essences, but are culturally constructed, just as 

much as sexuality and sex are cultural constructions, hobbles the possibility of a feminist 

identity grounded in any kind of “natural” category of women” (Ramazanoglu, 1993, 

116). 

Broadly speaking the two main camps of feminist thought oppose each other on these 

very grounds. On the one hand ‘Goddess’ feminism seeks a spiritual connection with 

mother earth, and on the other there is radical feminism, which rejects everything that can 

be plausibly situated within male defined institutions. These are but two counter 

discourses to a system of compulsory heterosexuality. These resistant discourses speak 

new truths, validating different sexual identities right across the board. As one such 

resistant discourse, feminism utilises Foucault’s notion of bodies as a battleground of 

interests and power. 

“Bodies are produced, understood, deployed in the service of certain interests and 

relationships of power… Foucault’s understanding of bodies as the simultaneous source 

and product of a notion of self allows for strategic redeployment of these embattled 

bodies” (Ibid., 115). 

Jana Sawiki (1991) notes that Foucault’s theory of identities as culturally constructed and 

plural gives rise to a ‘politics of difference’ where different identities intersect, 

multiplying the forms of resistance.  

“Where there is power there is resistance” (Sawiki, 1991, 56). 

Indeed power always produces resistance through discourse. Power relations are 

established within the historical field of conflict and struggle, with the potential for 

liberation and domination, just as discourse legitimates or opposes the societal order. 

“Foucault does not hope to transcend power relations altogether but rather to multiply the 

forms of resistance to the many forms that power relations take” (Ibid., 62). 

Foucault’s politics of difference rejects humanism, which places the subject at the centre 

of history and reality, as the subject is fragmented and decentred in the social field 

through the very process of subjectivisation. For example the technologies of femininity 

(i.e. makeup, dress, how to walk in high heels etc.) subjugate by developing skills & 

competencies.  

“Disciplinary technologies control the body through techniques that simultaneously 

render it more useful, more powerful and more docile” (Ibid., 83). 

These are highly effective as they enhance the power of the subject at the same time as 

subjugating him/her. However, female body builders define a new aesthetic that 

destabilises feminine bodily identity and confuses gender. As power cannot exist without 

resistance, individuals are the vehicles as well as the targets of power. Audre Lorde, a 

black lesbian feminist mother and poet remarks: 

“I find that I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and 

present this as the meaningful whole” (Ibid., 65).  

Being the vehicle as well as the target of power in this case necessitates the repression of 

other character aspects. It is through disciplinary technologies and the notion that power 

cannot exist without resistance, that women are produced by patriarchal power at the 

same time as they resist it. One of Foucault’s principal aims was to analyse the power 

relations governing the production and dissemination of discourses. He was aware that 

oppositional discourses often extend the very relations of their own domination. Critical 

feminist theory has resistance to identification built into it as dis-identification with 

femininity, as it has been defined by a male dominated society. 

Thus far in the chapter I have introduced the concept of discourse as constituting its own 

truth. This is a crucial mechanism for understanding a Foucauldian application of theory, 

as it forms a conceptual base that theoretical building blocks may be placed on top of. We 

can already see the relevance to this thesis, as power being constituted through discourse 

is extremely pertinent when one considers the nature of cyberspace as a facilitator of 

discourse transactions. From here the discussion moves onto ‘bio-power’ and 

‘genealogy’, as Foucauldian mechanisms serving the theoretical project of an “invitation 

to discussion” (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ics/ctr-fou3.htm, 1). 

Bio Power and Genealogy 

“[Foucault]… he examines particular ways whereby the conception of a subject and its 

domain, such as sexuality, punishment or pathology, is constituted within knowledge as a 

concern central to a specific age, society or social stratum” (Featherstone, Hepworth & 

Turner, 1991, 226). 

The conception of a subject as central to a specific age involves locating the body as a 

site for the operations of power. It is primarily through sex and the establishment of 

‘normal’ behaviour by society that the notion of bio-power arises. The new domain of 

political life constituted by body (bio) politics consists of the following aspects: 

“…the investment of the body with properties making it pliable to new technologies of 

control; the emergence of normalisation; the divestment of power from an absolute 

sovereign to a magnitude of regulative agencies located throughout the social body; and, 

the advent of empirical human sciences, making possible these new technologies of 

control” (Ibid., 228). 

In cyberspace these regulative agencies are replicated from real life, for example you may 

be punished for illegal acts. However there are also specific instances of self regulatory 

systems such as moderated discussion groups, where the group itself upholds order by 

“flaming” (reproaching by expressing a point of view opposed to the recipient; also 

verges on character assassination), or exclusion (perhaps the most effective self 

regulatory mechanism). Deviations from ‘the norm’ established by either society or 

cybercommunity then, can be disciplined. The mechanisms for judging both deviations 

and extent of deviation are embedded in the very core of our society: teachers, 

psychiatrists, social workers etc. It is through the process of problematisation that the 

illusion of ‘normality’ is created. In this light normalisation becomes the great strategy of 

power.  

“…these transformations involved new forms of knowledge and power, both reinforcing 

one another within what Foucault terms the power/knowledge complex (pouvoir/savoir). 

Clinical medicine, psychiatry, educational psychology and criminology arose to provide 

discourses that promulgated new technologies of intervention, new targets and new 

policies” (Foucault 1979a, 189-91: cited in Featherstone, Hepworth & Turner, 1991, 

229). 

Thus bio-power is power over bodies, inscribed into the regulative mechanisms of society 

through social policy, which has become one of the main apparatuses of state power. 

‘Policing’ in this context is defined as the ensemble of mechanisms upholding societal 

order, the conditions for health preservation and properly channelled accumulation of 

wealth (Featherstone, Hepworth & Turner, 1991, 238). It is the main technology of 

discipline that accounts for the local origins of bio-power.  

Policing and power are united with knowledge through discourse. Foucault’s method of 

studying history through the analysis of discourses is called genealogy. This method was 

designed to study how discourses exercise power, rather than exploring to whom power 

actually belongs. Subjects are constituted in this method within the discourse of social 

policy. Within any one instance of discourse, a relationship between subject and social 

conditions is evident, illuminating the way they are constituted as knowledge within 

discourse. It is the analysis of these socially and historically situated discourses that 

constitutes genealogy. Foucault’s genealogical method was concerned with tracing 

discursive formation. This replaced the method of archaeology, which sought to 

‘excavate’ the rules that form an exclusive discourse, during the 1970’s.  

““Genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary.” This announces Foucault’s 

treatment of history as text. Genealogy is gray because it is not black or white; it is not 

random or haphazard but a careful consideration of texts that have been written and 

rewritten from multiple perspectives. It is opposed to ‘metahistory’, which presupposes a 

grand teleology and search for origins…” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (1971) cited 

in http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/fouc.B1.html) 

Foucault’s genealogy takes all the available discursive documents to re-evaluate the 

surface of cultural activity in a given period. It attempts to discover what the historical 

discourses hide from themselves. Through exposing the legitimating ideologies of a 

system such as cyberspace by archiving events into narrative form, genealogy produces a 

new reading based on a different set of assumptions than the customary one. This kind of 

analysis produces a different way of conceiving the present through changing the way we 

read the past. 

“…Foucault chooses the organic metaphor, seeing the present as ‘birthed’ by the past” 

(Ibid.). 

The present having been born to the past is an excellent metaphor for comprehending 

Foucault’s notion of genealogy. I will give a brief example here of what a genealogy of 

cyberspace might look like. However, whilst I recognise this as a worthy pursuit, I do not 

intend to fully explore it here. Consequently this is one such point which may be taken up 

for further research at a later date. 

A Genealogy of the Internet 

During the Cold War in the late 1950’s, the United States Department of Defence 

decided that the nation’s communication systems needed protecting against the threat of 

a nuclear conflict. Such a war would completely destroy the existing communication 

network. In 1962 a researcher named Paul Baran proposed building a decentralised 

network, connecting remote computers all over the United States. In the event of a 

nuclear detonation this system would be able to maintain communication by 

dynamically adjusting its connections. Thus, it could survive any of the network nodes 

being destroyed. The proposal was expanded upon and developed by various members 

of the computing community. In 1969 the first packet switching (a technical name for 

packets of data being sent through a system of nodes) network was funded by the 

Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPAnet linked four 

research facilities: the University of Utah, the Stanford Research Institute, and the 

Universities of California at both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Being decentralised, 

it was relatively easy to add more machines to ARPAnet.  All that was needed was a 

modem (computer hardware for communicating over a telephone), a telephone line, and 

some Network Control Protocol software to enable the addressing and interpretation of 

data packets. ARPAnet had grown to include over one hundred mainframe computers 

within just a couple of years. As the main use of this system was to facilitate interaction 

between scientists and researchers, it immediately became a forum for the exchange of 

information and ideas. Thus, the decentralised public information network known as the 

Internet was born.  

Without analysing any additional texts we can utilise the genealogical method here, as an 

exploration of the historical situation reveals the military and academic roots that has 

shaped the nature of cybersociety today. For instance the social landscape of cyberspace 

is still largely composed of white male professionals and academics exchanging 

information on diverse topics.  

The present is not a fixed product of the past however. It is rather one of many events, 

embedded into a process that is forever striving towards the future. If history is viewed as 

a series of fictions then the present must also be fictitious, as it only exists as such for a 

moment, before becoming history itself. Rather than freeze present and past as in 

metaphysics, genealogy attempts to leave this inevitable process of time in motion. Thus 

the fiction of simultaneous events suggests there is no fixed reality. The nature of truth, 

discourse and power as constituted within genealogy resist absolutes, rather than 

attempting to be determinate. 

I began this subsection with the notion of bio-power and normality as created through the 

mechanism of problematisation. This is relevant here, as bio-power offers us a theoretical 

means of thinking about the mechanisms of social control being embedded into the core 

of society itself. I believe this notion can be applied to cyberspace, which operates with 

the same mechanisms for judging deviation as real life. That is to say, it is the same 

doctors, teachers, social workers etc. that regulate normality in cyberspace as in real life, 

as they are the same people with the same knowledge, but in a different environment. 

Thus the autonomous regulation which is taken for granted in many news groups can be 

theorised through the vehicle of Foucault.  

The discussion of genealogy is an extension of bio-power in some respects, as it brings 

temporality into the equation. Genealogy then, is the recording of moments in history 

where new discursive forms emerge out of inflected truths, attempting to uncover 

‘legitimating ideologies’. 

The thesis now moves onto where Foucault stands in relation to the notion of a class 

society faced with globalisation. I’ve used Marx here to illustrate my ideas, as being the 

initiator of class discourse he is a good example of a trans-discursive theorist. I also 

discuss power through the notion of individual and collective consciousness. This is 

highly relevant to identity within virtual worlds.