"Society Must Be Defended" (1975–1976)

• In Event: Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France: Implications for Research in Education

Abstract

In this paper I will be reading Foucault’s (2003) College de France lectures titled, Society Must be Defended (SMBD), as a framework for thinking about the decolonising educational projects of the settler colonial countries of the Pacific Rim, and especially Australia. This reading provides some insights for thinking (again) about antiracism pedagogies in ways that account for old and new formations of colonisation (Alfred, 2005), and old and new racisms (Balibar, 1991). Recent sociology of colonisation in settler colonial countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA and South America) argues that the aim of settler colonialism is either the obliteration or complete assimilation of Indigenous peoples inside of the grid of the nation-state (Moran 2002; 2005; Verancini, 2010). We can also map how the colonising project shifts from frontier violence to the political technologies of neoliberalising social policy (Venn 2009). In terms of racism as a strategy for colonisation, for some decades now we witness a shift from asserting an evolutionist anthropology of ‘biological races’ to ‘the insurmountability of cultural differences’ (Balibar 1991, p. 21), or ‘racism without races’ (p. 21). The shift is not just a matter of camouflaging that old racism, made necessary by the disrepute into which the term ‘race’ and its derivatives has fallen. This new racism is the racism of ‘the era of ‘decolonisation’’ (p.21), which Balibar defines in terms of a reversal of population movements, ‘between the old colonies and the old metropolies’ (p. 21) and hence which centres on the ‘immigration complex’ (p. 21). In which case, immigration becomes the substitute for ‘race’ in the articulation of discourses of exclusion. Balibar reminds us that the primary function of theories of racism are to legitimate policies of exclusion that are so essential for the border work of the nation.
Society Must be Defended informs a small but growing archive in social theory (Elden 2016; Moreton-Robinson2015; Lemke 2011; De Silva, 2007), and education studies (Stoler 1995; Ball 2013; Peters et al 2009). In this paper I will focus on the following themes:
• Foucault outlines his own approach as archeological and genealogical that aims at an insurrection of subjugated knowledges;
• SMBD outlined a conceptualization of the relationship between power-knowledge-subjectivity and provided a frame for rethinking power relations through 3 formations, sovereignty, disciplinary power and biopower;
• SMBD maps the emergence of a new historiography in the 16th and 17th centuries that highlights the struggle between peoples, as a race war and before racism was invented.
• During the 16th and 17th century, War, was understood by some as a grid of intelligibility for politics, and expressed in counter-history, that later, the State sought in vain to silence by homogenizing, normalizing, and universalising;
• Biopower emerges in the 18th century as a counter to disciplinary power and another way of governing that focuses on controlling populations; and
• During the 19th century, the race war morphs into state racism that includes the genocidal forms of colonization that seeks to eliminate ‘others’ and cleanse one’s own ‘race’.

Author

• Robert James Hattam, University of South Australia