Abstract
The objective of this chapter is to clarify the social theory underlying in Foucault’s genealogy of power/knowledge thanks to a comparison with Tarde’s microsociology. Nietzsche is often identified as the direct (and unique) predecessor of this genealogy, and the habitual criticisms are worried about the intricate relations between Foucault and Marx. These perspectives omit to point to another – and more direct – antecedent of Foucault`s microphysics: the microsociology of Gabriel Tarde. Bio-power technologies must be read as Tardian inventions that, by propagation, have reconfigured pre-existing social spaces, building modern societies. We will see how the Tardean source in Foucault’s genealogy sheds new clarity about the micro-socio-logic involved in it, enabling us to identify some of its aporiae and to imagine some solutions in this respect as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Deleuze was the first one to point out the necessity of comparing Foucauldian microphysics and Tardean microsociology (and also Bourdieu’s sociology of strategies). “Here we ought to contrast Foucault’s thought with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of ‘strategies’, and ask in what sense the latter constitutes a microsociology. Perhaps in turn we ought to contrast both these forms of thought with Tarde’s microsociology” (Deleuze 1986: 142).
- 2.
Nietzsche summed up this mnemotechnic and its functions as follows: “How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it will stick?…This age-old question was not resolved with gentle solutions and methods, as can be imagined; perhaps there is nothing more terrible and strange in man’s prehistory than his technique of mnemonics. ‘A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory’ – that is a proposition from the oldest (and unfortunately the longest-lived) psychology on Earth”. (Nietzsche 2007: 38)
- 3.
“However, do not confuse my thought with the great man theory. In my view, what conduct the world are not great men, but great ideas that nest in little men. A mass of fruitful inventions (the one of the cero, or the gunpowder) are anonymous; they emanate from obscure individuals…” (Tarde 1902a: 562).
- 4.
Foucault stated this in strictly Tardean terms:
The “invention” of this new political anatomy must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is rather a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method. (Foucault 1995: 138)
- 5.
Foucault makes an extensive use of another Tardean law in the first volume of The History of Sexuality: the “cascade” principle. This principle plays a major role in the explanation of how the modern devices of control (and production) of sexuality was “elaborated in its more complex and intense forms, by and for the privileged classes, (and) spread through the entire social body.” As Foucault himself puts it: “If one writes the history of sexuality in terms of repression, relating this repression to the utilization of labor capacity, one must suppose that sexual controls were the more intense and meticulous as they were directed at the poorer classes; one has to assume that they followed the path of greatest domination and the most systematic exploitation: the young adult man, possessing nothing more than his life force, had to be the primary target of a subjugation destined to shift the energy available for useless pleasure toward compulsory labor. But this does not appear to be the way things actually happened. On the contrary, the most rigorous techniques were formed and, more particularly, applied first, with the greatest intensity, in the economically privileged and politically dominant classes. (…) The bourgeoisie began by considering that its own sex was something important, a fragile treasure, a secret that had to be discovered at all costs (…) For their part, the working classes managed for a long time to escape the deployment of ‘sexuality’. (…) As for the mechanisms of sexualization, these penetrated them slowly and apparently in three successive stages” (Foucault 1984: 120/121).
- 6.
Foucault summarizes this as follows: “In any case, it can be said that, in the late eighteenth century, one is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish. The first is the one that was still functioning and which was based on the old monarchical law. The other two both refer to a preventive, utilitarian, corrective conception of a right to punish that belongs to society as a whole; but they are very different from one another at the level of the mechanisms they envisage. (…) We have, then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise; the vanquished enemy, the juridical subject in the process of requalification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training. We have here the three series of elements that characterize the three mechanisms that face one another in the second half of the eighteenth century”. (Foucault 1995: 130/1).
- 7.
On this point see Deleuze (2003).
- 8.
This is true for the “genealogic” Foucault, but it does not seem accurate for the “ethic” one. And, perhaps, all this last period of his work can be read precisely as an answer to that problem. Regarding the individual “unfolding”, Tarde has mostly focused on her/his occurrence in the crowd and the public (see chapter “Individuals, Publics, and Crowds. Where Does Social Change Come From?” of this book).
- 9.
Thus, for instance, what kind of panopticon is a Latin American (panoptical) prison, which is invariably overcrowded? Saying that it is an underdeveloped disciplinary device would not help much, and it will replicate, in this theoretical context, the Eurocentric fallacy that sees deficient applications of the central model in any other type of societal functioning. Instead, doesn’t it give an account of the cultural thickness of the social formations that received that invention “from the North”? Wasn’t this invention modified by its travel to other lands at the same time it modified them? This is not only an empirical problem. It concerns the existence, or not, of concepts that enable us to think social life as truly relational and as iterative processes – namely, thinking social life from the point of view of a paradigm of infinitesimal difference. A paradigm in which Foucault´s work plays, certainly, a very relevant role.
- 10.
Therefore, it is possible to relativize some opinions according to which “the microphysics of power explains neither how multiple and disperse power relations assume a certain ‘coherent’ or ‘unified’ form, nor how they traduce in more or less global strategies or social hegemony, which can in turn act on societal micro-powers” (Lemnke 2004: 16). This could be valid if Foucault’s genealogic approach was, so to speak, one-dimensional, and if its sole dimension was Nietzschean. But, as we have tried to show here, not one but two main “hypotheses” support this approach. Or, maybe, it can be said that one Nietzschean hypothesis and one Tardean grammar are at stake here. The last one is the one which gives an account of the Foucauldian view of society’s constitution.
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Tonkonoff, S. (2017). Diffusion or War? Foucault as a Reader of Tarde. In: From Tarde to Deleuze and Foucault. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55149-4_4
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