A set of lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the College de France during the late 1970s was recently published under the title, Security, Territory and Population. They trace out the genealogy of what Foucault calls “governmentality,” which is a snazzy way of talking about the development of the practice of governing men. An important part of that genealogy is what I’m writing about in this essay: the pastorate.
The idea of men governing men was neither Greek nor Roman, Foucault argues. Rather, that men are to govern the conduct of other men was a concept that developed in the pre-Christian East and then the Christian East. The idea and organization of what Foucault calls “pastoral power” can first be found throughout the Mediterranean East, in Egypt, Assyria, Mesopotamia and in the Hebrews. To use Foucault’s words: “The pastoral relationship in its full and positive form is therefore essentially the relationship of God to men. It is a religious type of power that God exercises over his people.”
Foucault describes some of the key feature of pastoral power as it appeared in the pre-Christian East. First, it is a power that is not exercised over a territory, as in Greek thought, but “over a flock, and more exactly, over the flock in its movement from one place to another.” He continues: “The Hebrew God…is the God moving from place to place, the God who wanders. The presence of the Hebrew God is never more intense and visible than when his people are on the move, and when, in this people’s wanderings, in the movement that takes them from the town, the prairies, and pastures, he goes ahead and shows his people the direction they must follow.”
Second, pastoral power is “fundamentally a beneficent power.” In other words, the basic “objective of pastoral power is the salvation of the flock.” This kind of power manifests itself in a duty to care, “a task to be undertaken, so that…the form it takes is not first of all the striking display of strength and superiority. Pastoral power initially manifests itself in its zeal, devotion, and endless application.” The shepherd is continually vigilant, “someone who keeps watch” for possible evils and misfortunes that endanger the flock.
Third, pastoral power is an individualizing power. “That is to say,” as Foucault put it, “it is true that the shepherd directs the whole flock, but he can only really direct it insofar as not a single sheep escapes him.” So, the shepherd counts his flock daily as a way of identifying any individual lost sheep. “He does everything for the totality of his flock, but he does everything also for each sheep of the flock.” This creates what Foucault calls the “paradox of the shepherd: the sacrifice of one for all, and the sacrifice of all for one.”
To this end, Foucault says that the “pastorate begins with a process that is absolutely unique in history.” It is the “process by which a religion, a religious community, constitutes itself as a Church, that is to say, as an institution that claims to govern men in their daily life on the grounds of leading them to eternal life in the other world, and to do this not only on the scale of a definite group, of a city or a state, but of the whole of humanity.” Pastoral power is absolutely bound up with the organization of a religion as a Church that lays claim to the daily government of men, where some people are taught the government of others and others are taught to let themselves be governed by certain people.
Re: The Shepherd's Power
Did Foucault speak with approval or disapproval of pastoral power - or was it simply a phenomenon that he observed?
There has been a great deal on the UK radio this week (eg ‘1968: Philosophy in the Streets’/BBC Radio 4, 11.00am 30 April) recalling the student uprisings in Paris and France in May 1968 (from some of its chief protagonists), and the subsequent ‘retreat’ into the universities and philosophical/literary/sociological theory of the student movement, when the workers went back to work, and De Gaulle came back into power.
Foucault was one of the elite group of thinkers who came to be associated with this continuation of the uprising by intellectual means - along with the post-structuralists and post-modernists - Barthes, Levi Strauss, Lacan and Derrida. Umberto Eco also pursued the post-modernist track, both in literary works (Eg The Name of the Rose) and philosophical and literary theory. Barthes published his ‘Death of the Author’ in 1968, which denied authorial intention and presence as an authentic guide to the meaning of a text. Lyotard was the historian of the movement.
What is the relevance of all this now? A great deal, apparently. Nicolas Sarkozy was quoted in a pre-presidential speech furiously attacking the aims and values of the 1968 student movement. Evidently he still thinks that all that is wrong with France can be traced back to the thinking of this time.
I noticed with our two daughters at primary school, that English teachers, even at their very young age, talked about learning to study a text, rather than reading a book - by an author. Texts are in, books are out. The concept of the autonomous text is one beloved of postmodern deconstructive theory.
Today, issues which are common currency in academic circles are also of importance to the wider community, and nowhere more so than in faiths which rest on the interpretation of their sacred ‘texts’. Where does meaning reside? Is it in the head of the author, the reader, or the text? And what are the unseen power systems and structures which govern our understanding of texts in perhaps unseen ways, and which need to be unmasked and exposed?
Built into the Judaeo-Christian faith is something fascinating. YHWH is of course the ‘unseen’ power; but his authority is constantly being challenged and subverted by other power systems - not least the misapprehensions concerning him and their faith by the Jewish people. Built into the Judaeo-Christian tradition is the phenomenon of self-critique - which was performed by the prophets, as YHWH’s spokespersons, but perhaps supremely by Jesus himself.
Jesus was the subverter of power systems and structures par excellence. He came in weakness and vulnerability. He exercised his right to rule not through coercion but love and compassion, and ultimately by surrendering himself to be put to death. He brought a critique of his own people, and their ingrained perception of how God worked within their national faith systems and structures. He also brought a critique of their attitude to pagans, and of pagan power. ‘Critique’ is perhaps too mild a word - it was devastating.
Jesus is also the archetypal ‘postmodern’. He came not to establish an institution, but worked through relationships, especially through a small group of friends. He worked not through pronouncing key propositions of the faith, but embodied truth in his own person, and through the stories he told. And yet he did not deny the history of Israel and his role within it; without advocating suspicion of overarching metanarratives, he set a critique of one narrative against a suggestion of a true metanarrative - which he had come to fulfil. But you could almost miss the metanarrative he brought - such is the self-effacement of the way in which it is brought. Yet it is there, all the time.
His own metanarrative was the most overarching of all narratives. I have set out to explore these in my posts on Christ and Eschatology - especially in posts 2-4.
Postmodernism can itself become a power game that needs to be subverted. My suggestion is that in Jesus, we have a model for faith and praxis which operates effortlessly within a postmodern environment, and yet subverts the postmodern - just as it did, ultimately, the modern. Jesus eludes captivity in all the power systems and power games on offer, and all the philosophical enterprises which seek to capture this thing called life in their nets, holding them ultimately for display in the museum cases of history.
Jesus especially eludes the power games of our churches and denominations.Incredibly, he expresses himself through them, in ways they have not been able to control. Remember the moving of the Spirit in the 1960’s/70’s -now so much derided? It was revolutionary. Yet who in the institutional churches of the time was calling for such a phenomenon.
Jesus will also not allow himself to be contained in the systems we have created for him, and just as we think we have, sightings are reported of him elsewhere - in the shanty-towns, the shebeens, the rubbish dumps of our world and culture. Woe to those who think they have him perfectly represented in whatever system or structure they devise - be it theological or ecclesiological. Long live the radical movements - and for that reason, long live the values of 1968!
As one of the student leaders said: ‘Let’s be realistic. Let’s think the impossible!’
Re: Re: The Shepherd's Power
From my reading, Foucault didn’t really speak in overly positive or negative terms about the pastorate. He just wrote the way he wrote, which was always to describe and to suggest in ways that were otherwise.
Foucault, however, did speak rather negatively about the late modern “monster” that is pastoral power combined with the security apparatuses of state, where individualizing and totalizing relations meet, where a whole national population can be sacrificed (e.g. nuclear weapons) by an individual.
As Foucault put it in the History of Sexuality Vol. 1, “The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states…. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; is is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.”