{"id":658,"date":"2015-11-24T17:52:30","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T22:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=658"},"modified":"2018-08-11T16:37:09","modified_gmt":"2018-08-11T20:37:09","slug":"foucault-613-john-protevi-on-society-must-be-defended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/11\/24\/foucault-613-john-protevi-on-society-must-be-defended\/","title":{"rendered":"John Proveti | On the Boomerang Effect and Savage War"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0John Protevi<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to make two comments here.<\/p>\n

First<\/span>, about the \u201cboomerang effect\u201d (SD 103): seminar participants [Jean Cohen, Nadia Urbinati, Ann Stoler, Alex Gil, Neni Panourgi\u00e0] mentioned several names, including that of C\u00e9saire and the\u00a0Discourse on Colonialism\u00a0<\/em>where Nazi genocide is seen as a return from the colonies. Here are some others.<\/p>\n

I would point out, following\u00a0Professor Stoler<\/a>\u00a0in discussion after the seminar, the work of Sidney Mintz in\u00a0Sweetness and Power<\/a>\u00a0(also mentioned by Thomas\u00a0Holt in\u00a0his selection<\/a>\u00a0from the\u00a0recommended readings<\/a>), which looks at, among other things, productivity enhancing discipline in New World sugar plantations coming back to European factories.<\/p>\n

The connection with biopower is here noticeable, as, following Robin Blackburn\u2019s work, we can point to the awareness of the relation of death rates to work output to purchase and importation rates of \u201cfresh\u201d enslaved people. (See here for remarks<\/a>\u00a0on why I’ve come to believe that \u201censlaved people\u201d is preferable to \u201cslaves.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Another boomerang effect is of course the thesis of CLR James\u2019s\u00a0The Black Jacobins<\/a>, the radicalization of the French Revolution by the action of the rebels of Saint-Domingue. (James\u2019s mention of suicide and infanticide as resistance techniques among the enslaved population brings us back to the above point.)<\/p>\n

Second<\/span>, on the relation to notions in Deleuze and Guattari on two points: the notion of \u201csavage war\u201d in the context of Foucault\u2019s treatment of Hobbes (SD 90), and on the distinction of savage and barbarian in Boulainvilliers (SD 194-199).<\/p>\n

About the sketch of the \u201cbarbarian\u201d presented in indirect discourse as Foucault ventriloquizes Boulainvilliers (SD 194-199).\u00a0The barbarian is opposed by Boulainvilliers to the \u201csavage\u201d of social contract theory and classical economics, the man of exchange (of rights or of goods, i.e.,\u00a0homo politicus<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0homo economicus<\/em>). The savage exists before or outside history (and hence must be opposed by Boulainvilliers’s radically historical discourse). For jurists, the savage exists before history and comes to exchange rights to found the social body, while for economists, the savage is without history, motivated only by self-interest in exchange.\u00a0The barbarian, by contrast, is essentially historical, dominating, and free. He is always in an exterior relation to pre-existing civilization. He is essentially dominating; he takes and enslaves rather than exchanges. And he is essentially free: he never trades freedom for security.<\/p>\n

One of the participants [Rosalind Morris] mentioned here the tripartite division in\u00a0Anti-Oedipus<\/em>\u00a0of savages, barbarians, and civilized. However, in AO, \u201cbarbarian\u201d refers to imperial state formations; the exterior, anti-state forces or \u201cwar machine\u201d is not developed until\u00a0A Thousand Plateaus<\/em>; the point of highest intensity of the war machine is the steppe nomads (as in the quote from Desnos at SD 198-199).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to make any strong claims about influence here, but I\u2019m struck by the resonances between Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s notion of the war machine and what Foucault writes about in his brief sketch of the centralization of the power of war in the European State. Foucault writes \u201cwhat was actually called \u2018private warfare\u2019 was eradicated from the social body\u2026 gradually, the entire social body was cleansed of the bellicose relations that had permeated it through and through during the Middle Ages\u201d (SD 48). (On the twists and turns in the notion of “war” in Foucault, here is\u00a0my entry<\/a>\u00a0on the subject in the\u00a0Cambridge Foucault Lexicon<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

About the notion of “savage war” in Foucault’s treatment of Hobbes, another of the participants [Stathis Gourgouris] \u00a0mentioned Pierre Clastres, suggesting that his work in\u00a0Society Against the State<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[French publication of this essay collection was in 1974, but his articles were well-known before then] could clarify Foucault\u2019s formulation of the reference to the savage peoples of America cited by Hobbes. Foucault writes \u201cFirst, what is this war that exists before the State, and which the State is, in theory, destined to end? What is this war that the State has pushed back into prehistory, into savagery, into its mysterious frontiers, but which is still going on? And second, how does this war give birth to the State?\u201d (SD 90).<\/p>\n

Things are very complex here (I\u2019m confident the seminar participant [Gourgouris] mentioning Clastres knows all this, so I\u2019m just expanding on what he would have said had he had more time), so I\u2019d like to mention\u00a0this essay of mine<\/a>\u00a0that goes into some detail.<\/p>\n

Briefly, however, I can make the following points.<\/p>\n

As detailed in a fine recent book by\u00a0Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc<\/a>,\u00a0Politique et \u00c9tat chez Deleuze et Guattari<\/a>\u00a0(Paris: PUF, 2013), Clastres can’t determine the conditions for the emergence of state; he can only state the conditions of its non-emergence: \u201csavage war\u201d as anti-State mechanism relies on keeping chiefs from becoming kings by trapping them in a prestige-war cycle: to maintain prestige they must wage war from the front lines but in doing so they condemn themselves to high risk of death so they won\u2019t survive long enough to consolidate sovereign power.<\/p>\n

Sibertin-Blanc lets us see what Deleuze and Guattari are doing with their notion of the Urstaat and the “auto-presupposition” of the state: it needs a surplus to feed its specialists but it needs specialists to produce and other specialists to monitor and confiscate that very surplus. This is a rewriting of Wittfogel (1957), who himself rewrites the Marxist \u201cAsiatic mode of production.\u201d The state is not the instrument of a pre-existing dominant class: it is itself the direct organization of society enabling surplus production which it then immediately appropriates; it is therefore itself what produces the dominant and subordinate classes. It is to address this problem of auto-presupposition that Deleuze and Guattari have recourse in\u00a0Anti-Oedipus<\/em>\u00a0to Nietzsche’s idea of the break into history of the immediately arriving conquerors.<\/p>\n

Leaving Sibertin-Blanc to the side, we could contrast Clastres\u2019s anti-State mechanism of inter-group war with Christopher Boehm\u2019s recent ethnography of nomadic foragers revealing\u00a0intra-group mechanisms of ridicule, exile, and \u201ccapital punishment\u201d<\/a>\u00a0aimed at maintaining radical egalitarian structures.\u00a0Boehm\u2019s\u00a0Moral Origins<\/em><\/a>\u00a0also speaks of vendetta as an inter-group mechanism that is both anti-State and anti-war. His work can be connected with that of Raymond Kelly, whose\u00a0Warless Societies and the Origin of War<\/em><\/a>\u00a0discusses the lack of a \u201clogic of social substitution\u201d that keeps personalized vendetta as inter-group violence below the threshold of \u201cwar.\u201d (See\u00a0here for Kelly’s paper<\/a>\u00a0upon induction into the National Academy of Sciences.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0John Protevi I\u2019d like to make two comments here. First, about the \u201cboomerang effect\u201d (SD 103): seminar participants [Jean Cohen, Nadia Urbinati, Ann Stoler, Alex Gil, Neni Panourgi\u00e0] mentioned several names, including that of C\u00e9saire and the\u00a0Discourse on Colonialism\u00a0where Nazi… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38940,38959],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foucault-613","category-posts-6-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}