"Omnes et Singulatim"

Foucault’s 1979 Stanford Tanner Lectures, “Omnes et Singulatim”, represent an earlier version of an inquiry which he was later to publish as the first section of the better-known 1982 essay “The Subject and Power”. As in “The Subject and Power” Foucault is here concerned to understand the relation between power and the forms of rationalization which operate alongside it. And, as in “The Subject and Power”, the result of his inquiry is to have uncovered a form of modern power and its rationalization which consists in “the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (1982, 336).

Foucault is clear in the later essay that he intends his work as aiming towards a criticism of this simultaneous individualization and totalization, a form of political rationality whose paradigm is the modern state: “the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is… to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state” (1982, 336). Foucault, in other words does not want to defend a new form of romantic privacy vis-à-vis the public power of the state, but neither does he want to defend increased public powers vis-à-vis modern forms of freedom. Rather, what he seems to be insisting upon is an alternative to modern power and knowledge themselves, where these are understood in terms of the simultaneous production of opposed spheres of state totalization and non-state individualization.

“Omnes et Singulatim” is in my opinion less convincing at setting forward the thesis which Foucault would later publish, but his attempt here is nevertheless productive. The piece consists of two lectures, the first of which traces the early development of pastoral power in first centuries of Christianity, and the second of which traces the later development of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. The overall theme which Foucault here seems to be working toward is the idea that the early Christian pastoral power was reactivated in the early part of the modern era in such a way as to be redeployed along the lines of what Foucault had elsewhere called governmentality. Pastoral power, then, is the genealogical ancestor of modern governmentality. (An obvious question, though, is this: Why does Foucault not use the term “governmentality” in this essay? He had already introduced it elsewhere? Is the not talking about governmentality here? Is he no longer satisfied with that term? If so, is the concept the same?)

So what is it about early pastoral power that Foucault finds important for later governmentality? First, pastoral power is clearly totalizing. “[T]he shepherd was to assume responsibility for the destiny of the whole flock” (1979, 308). Pastoral power is a technique of caring for an entire flock. The shepherd does not look after just a few. He cares for the whole flock, in its entirety, taken as a total unit. But second, pastoral power is also individualizing. “Christian pastorship implies a peculiar type of knowledge between the pastor and each of his sheep” (1979, 309). The shepherd individualizes his flock. He knows the details of each sheep. Each is cared for in these details and idiosyncracies. Individualization is looked after just as much as totalization.

It is, I believe, primarily this double process of individualization and totalization in pastoral power that Foucault finds of interest in his genealogical study of “the formation of the state” (1979, 312). Foucault traces this formation through two sets of doctrine, those of “reason of state” (314ff.) and “theory of police” (317ff). It is difficult to say what is new in Foucault’s analysis here. It does not seem that he really offers anything decisive that was not already given as early as the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975). While the finer details are seemingly not all that different, there is nonetheless a difference in the bigger picture. For Foucault is here explicit, as he was not always in Discipline and Punish, that what interests him in modern power is the way that it both individualizes and totalizes. Considering von Justi’s theory of police, Foucault writes: “He perfectly defines what I feel to be the aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality, namely to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state” (1979, 322). Still, even this view was somewhat on view as early as Discipline and Punish.

One other question concerns the status of Foucault’s inquiry in both “Omnes et Singulatim” and “The Subject and Power”. Both texts open with Foucault inquiring into the relation between power and rationalization (1979, 299, and 1982, 328). As Foucault better puts it later in “Omnes et Singulatim”: “Rather than wonder whether aberrant state power is due to excessive rationalism or irrationalism, I think it would be more appropriate to pin down the specific type of political rationality the state produced” (1979, 313). What are we to understand by Foucault’s use of the terms “rationalization” and “rationality” in these inquiries? Can we take him to be exploring the relation between power and knowledge that was crucial for his earlier work in the middle of the 1970s? Is “rationalization” here a synonym for “knowledge”? Is Foucault still interested in the “power/knowledge” relation? If so, why change the terms?

This question takes on added significance when we consider the final passages of “Omnes et Singulatim”. For here Foucault argues that political criticism cannot effectively take the form of the criticism of power in general nor of reason in general. Rather, “What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake” (1979, 324). It is not clear, however, what such a criticism should be. That Foucault places a great deal of weight on it in “Omnes et Singulatim” is, however, undeniable. The “inevitable effects” of our modern political rationality, he concludes, “are both individualization and totalization.” So what are we to do? “Liberation can come from attacking not just one of these two effects but political rationality’s very roots” (1979, 325). There is much to be gleaned from Foucault’s remark that it would be fruitless to oppose individualization to totalization (liberalism) or totalization to individualization (communism). What he seeks instead is a third way beyond the forms of modern power which turn us into the subjects that we are. However, I doubt there is much to be gained by following up on Foucault’s vague reference to attacking “rationality’s very roots”.

Instead, we might perhaps do better to follow Foucault’s own shift of tack in the early 1980s when he began to more fully flesh out a third axis intersecting with power and knowledge—the axis he variously referred to as subjectivity or experience. This strategy is already anticipated in “Omnes” where Foucault briefly refers to his problem in this text as concerning “the relations between experiences, knowledge, and power” (1979, 311). For what Foucault’s later studies of this axis would reveal is the way in which pastoral power and governmental power can also come to inhabit the closest aspects of experience itself, can also come to structure our very understanding of ourselves as subjects. Foucault’s work here was tied up with the elaboration of the Christian and modern hermeneutics of the subject, which in the language of “Omnes et Singulatim” can be seen as feeding into modern individualization and totalization. The alternative to the modern hermeneutics of telling the truth about oneself is a modern practice of freedom which, though Foucault never fully elaborated it in any of his essays, requires getting free of oneself.