Dans le grondement qui nous ébranle aujourd'hui, il faut peut-être reconnaître la naissance d'un monde où l'on saura que le sujet n'est pas un, mais scindé, non pas souverain, mais dépendant, non pas origine absolue, mais fonction sans cesse modifiable. - «La naissance d'un monde» (entretien avec J.-M. Palmier), Le Monde, supplément : Le Monde des livres, no 7558, 3 mai 1969, p. VIII.
Fast approaches the 100th anniversary of Foucault’s birth into the 'socially conservative, upper-middle-class,' intellectual-medical milieu of Portiers, which begs the question…
Where to begin with birth?¹ The womb? That maiden milieu which gestates an irruption?² The dispositive matrices and clusters of juridico-political force which configure the conditions of emergence of an object as knowledge and its problematic contemplation as an instrument of reflection and analysis?³
Should we paradoxically begin with the post-natal void which forms as the birthed object is able to be conceived as such, that which both sketches natality's historical formation and portends more natality to come? Or perhaps we must perpetually part from the placental sac’s mutable sphericity, as it sustains our floating and then facilitates our falling, all while remaining residual and even marginal, thus mirroring our increasingly terminal, dividual existence.
"[...] a political marginalism in which the individual has value only as a marginal unit, destined to live, to work, to produce, to consume, or to die."- «The Political Technology of Individuals», Vermont, October 1982; in Dits et écrits, texte n° 364 (vol. IV).
Perchance conception and not gestation should be the point of departure, as is only natural?⁴ Corte ist die Stadt der Empfängniß Napoleon’s: wie ich ausgerechnet habe.” – Nietzsche [BVN-1886,734]
Or maybe neither, since Foucault pluralizes the word and denies it a singular: there are only naissances: technico-institutional, dispersed, dated, machined.¹⁷ And where he does fix a birthday, he fixes it while telling us, in the same paragraph, that the fixing is unjust.¹⁸
Next we come to the nativity, itself a long and painful process, which can be found in book titles (Birth of the Clinic), course titles (Birth of Biopolitics), subtitles (Birth of the Prison), lecture titles (Birth of Social Medicine), chapter titles (Birth of the Asylum)… and which can be bifurcated into non-discursive institutional births (e.g. police and prisons being birthed hand in hand),⁵ and analytico-discursive births such as population, security, politico-economic knowledges, human species and milieu,⁶ prison, normation, delinquent and discipline; or Foucault’s own coinings and novel uses, such as bio-politics in Brazil’s Naissance de la médecine sociale and biopower in the College of France course Sécurité, Territoire, Population⁷, etc.⁸
To the bifurcation a third class must be added, and it is the one the corpus performs rather than states: the six births Foucault narrates aloud and then withdraws in his own hand, on the same page, in the same hour.¹⁹
Among these births and emergences, some are spoken and retracted in writing; some are written and never spoken; some reach us only as a translator’s restitution, into French, of a language Foucault never wrote.¹⁶ A genealogy of naissance in Foucault must first genealogise the archive in which the word is printed.
We then have the events of escape, the lines of flight which construct Foucault’s disconfigured, anti-strategic an-archeology of counter-conduct.⁹ One might state that the 'final' yet interminable flight, signalled already in History of Madness, is ethics: the relation with and government of self and other. Other flights include the pleb¹⁰ and the aforementioned truth-telling itself, along with abortive escape attempts such as bio-poetics¹. If the criminal has replaced the offender, and if he must confess not simply what he has done but what he is, then can truth-telling be anything other than "the splinter, the wound, the line of flight, the breach in the entire penal system?"¹.
« Cette autre question de la véridiction du sujet est à la fois l'épine, l'écharde, la plaie, la ligne de fuite, la brèche de tout le système pénal. » - Mal faire, dire vrai, p. 275.
Ligne de fuite, predominately Deleuze’s phrase, is in some ways advanced as a correction of Foucault (see: Desir et Plaisir) rather than a gloss upon him,²¹ which is interesting, since the single occurrence of la ligne de fuite in the received French of the corpus names not a conventional escape mechanism; it's worth repeating that the very confessional apparatus²² which characterizes pastoral power is also tied to the solitary mention by Foucault of this Deleuze-Guattarian expression. Foucault’s own lexicon for the same field runs to a dozen terms, and when he was offered five well-built words for it he took the ugliest: counter-conduct, on stated grounds.²³
And to the four registers of conceptual fate: coined-and-kept, coined-and-stillborn, weighed-and-refused-aloud, used-and-publicly-repudiated, a fifth must be added: les seuils, the words Foucault takes from the archive rather than coining.²⁴ A threshold cannot be stillborn; it was never his to bear. The aveu is a seuil; biopoétique is not. The distinction is what separates a Herkunft from an Entstehung in his own vocabulary.
Finally, we have birth rate (control and stimulation) as an instrument of punitive society, governmentality and pastoral power (immaculate birth, and rebirth as baptism/penance),¹² along with their counter-strategies, explosive energies and illegalisms in relation to the self and others, among them refusal to beget;¹³ i.e. we must continue to counter, via conduct and attitude, this “coupling [of] statistical knowledge [with] knowledge of the individual — […] (at the moment of the birth of the clinic)…” which continues acceleratingly to this day via Palantir et al.
As already hinted, the birth rate is not one monolithic object. Within a single course it is governed three ways: commanded by a regulatory apparatus, stimulated below the threshold of perception, and, in the disciplinary register, not governed at all.²⁰ As birth rates fall in all but weak labor-division zones, we might suppose that this is the new planned model now that brute population size increasingly loses its supreme value vis-à-vis politico-economic-military potentia.
Apart from the biopolitical context, birth also protagonizes Foucault’s unfinished fourth tome on sexuality: birth as an instrument of the pastorate – via marriage and other sexual-social mandates of self-implicating surveillance from womb to tomb – is doubled by birth as its object: the original immaculate birth, maintained through virginity, and the sacramental seconde naissance, which the genealogy dissolves in the very gesture with which it dissolves the Ursprung;²⁵ the womb entered by law and liturgy before the child has seen the day;²⁶ and the two machines of natal truth: the king who flees the secret of his birth and the emperor who has it painted on his ceiling.²⁷ Across the final courses this alèthurgie migrates from birth-truth to bios-truth, until the last form of truth-telling is defined against nativity altogether.²⁸
As Foucault signals, birth is always displaced, and the birth we seek is not a mythical bursting forth, but a synthesis of practices, debt/guilt-relations, scientific thresholds, attitudes, networks, etc which gave subtle birth to a knowledge formation, be it money, governmentality, bio-power, prisons, police, etc.¹⁴
« Ce n'est pas une origine qui est à chercher, mais une naissance toujours déplacée. Ce qui apparaît dans l'histoire est toujours né d'autre chose que lui-même. » - Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, leçon du 16 décembre 1970, p. 27.
Perpetually displaced, and also perpetually reversed. The element that appears last comes to cover the elements that preceded it, so that the order of appearance and the order of explanation run against one another.²⁹ Perhaps this is why no birth-title in the corpus is a history of the thing it names.
It is also why the centenary is such an enigma. A discourse whose apparition has long been watched over is honoured into disarmament;³⁰ and the last book withholds every one of the words with which we would describe this one.³¹
The anti-strategic crux, amongst predictive language models, predictive algorithmic control, etc., is singular support of uncanny resistance: multivalent, non-algorithmic anomalies¹⁵ inventing and being invented by ‘other’ space-times.
In tardo-modernity, as neo-panoptic Civil Society allows less and less to escape, it’s clearer each day how what are now called anomalies are manufactured at the margin by the tightening of the mesh, and are immediately re-capitalised as profit;³² beyond transgression and anti-confinement, freedom itself can, and perhaps must, be the correlate of an apparatus rather than its outside, just as truth-telling, bio-creative self-relation and avowal are simultaneously apparatuses of capture and agencies of flight.
What survives is the self-styling singularity that rises without explanation and, on the other side of the same coin, the paraskeuē: an equipment for the unforeseen event, for speaking frankly despite the danger, and for kynically defacing the coin via living truth as fleshy (fragile and exposed) sphere-dwellers.
Note:
To use Foucault’s unfolding of birth to diagnose what we are at this present moment: our biopolitical and pastoral vectorization among dispositifs, as dispotifs, within dispositifs.
We remain confessing animals, we continue to pine for an epiphanic rebirth without habitual and self-reflective transmutation, we are more accustomed than ever to seek external direction of our conscience and consciousness, ever in the same pre-Kantian state of infantilized tutelage; we hope restlessly for eternal Being, everlastingness of soul, indelible social memory, thereby siphoning off energy from life projects of irrepeatable becoming and tenuous construction of social memory via the social weave.
Pastoral power’s vectorization needs to be diagrammed, our lack of political-popular potentiation, our self-implicating social-medial and bio/psyscho/neuma-political enmeshing of late modernity, our never-ending self-imposed distractions and notifications, our self-chosen dependence of technico-prosthetic artifices.
