ABSTRACT
For Foucault, power is a relation between and within discourses. The state, to him, can be conceptualized as an “apparatus of social control which achieves its regulatory effects over everyday life through dispersed, multiple and often contradictory and competing discourses.”2 For him discourses form the objects of which they speak. They neither identify objects nor are they about objects. Discourses constitute objects. It is thus through discourses that the social production of meaning takes place, subjectivity is produced and power relations are maintained.3 For Foucault, the state initially was conceptualized as singular and external to the population. Thus, it was also conceptualized as fragile and perpetually under threat, since the external enemy wants to dismantle it and the internal population has no a priori reason to accept its rule. As a corollary, the state remained in a constant effort to exercise power in order to reinforce, strengthen and protect itself.4 To this was added the emphasis on territory and sovereignty (internal and external) in the seventeenth century. The conception of the state thus came to be dominated by the structures of sovereignty or the ‘reason of state.’ These structures however were circular in that the end of sovereignty was sovereignty itself. It did not, per se, include the task of government. Following the juridico-legal and rights based conceptualizations in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a transition in the discourse of the state took place. It replaced a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty by one ruled by techniques of government. In this transition, however, sovereignty did not disappear. It continued to exist along with the exegesis of government. As Foucault puts it:5
…we need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security.
