Foucault's ignorance of History- the vase of Soissons

Wikipedia tells me that 

The vase of Soissons was of marvelous size and beauty and was stolen (together with other holy ornaments) from a church in the pillage that followed the Battle of Soissons of 486, a battle won by the Frankish king Clovis I, who at that time had not yet converted to Christianity.[2]

Saint Remigius, the bishop of Reims, sent messengers to Clovis, begging that if the church might not recover any other of the holy vessels, at least this one might be restored. Clovis agreed to do so and therefore claimed the vase as his rightful part of the booty. One soldier disagreed and smashed the vase with his battle-axe. Clovis at first did not react to this and gave the broken vase to Remigius. A year later, however, he saw the soldier again, took the man's axe and threw it on the ground. The man bent down to pick up his axe, and Clovis smashed his skull with his own axe, commenting "Just as you did to the vase at Soissons!

Why might the Church have preserved this story? Clearly, we are speaking of an offense against God by infidels. Clovis showed an inborn inclinations to heed the call of the true Religion. He converted to Catholicism- i.e. would bow his head to the True Lord- and became the first King of France- indeed, the name Clovis, became Louis, eighteen of whom reigned as most Christian majesties. Thus something better than the vase of Soissons was restored. The soldier who broke it also bent down. But it was to retrieve his battle axe- that crosier of an auto-cephalic creed- only to never raise his head again.

What does Foucault make of it? In his 'Society must be defended' lectures he says that Clovis was not a king. He was a Civil Magistrate with respect to a bunch of 'individual landlords' who acknowledged no higher authority. 

Boulainvilliers was a partisan supporter of the rights of the Aristocracy against the King as much as against the Third Estate which, however, saw the true origins of France in the Romanized Gauls and rejected the notion that invading German thugs were natural aristocrats. Yet, Boulainvilliers celebrated Charlemagne as having reversed the absolutism established by Clovis (Christianization is an example of absolutism) and rebalanced the polity by giving greater salience to the Barons and to Parliament. The fool- like others of his caste- thought Parliament would be a weapon in the hands of meritorious blue-bloods against the King and the rabble. However, there was little merit among his ilk. The Guillotine awaited them.

It should be noted that Boulainvilliers, on the basis of Remigius's congratulatory letter to Clovis, surmised that he had founded the Frankish monarchy, inheriting kingship of the Ripuarian Franks from his father Childeric, and this happened soon after he was elected general of the Salian Franks. This was to impose the terminology of a later, more modern, period on a tribal society. That the leader of a raiding party be elected though acclamation may have been a traditional requirement. Tribes use 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- e.g. which individual is uniquely identified as the son of previous war-leader- because 'bourgeois strategies' (to use the game theoretic jargon of John Maynard Smith) reduce wasteful competition and thus are 'eusocial'- for the same reason that segmentary societies use 'Dynasticism' (e.g. the Indian National Congress which is the family property of Rahul Gandhi) as a principle to reduce factionalism in their polities. One might say Boulainvilliers is distorting history but no great damage to the facts of the case was done by him.

 However, what Foucault says is nonsense. The spoils of war were always divided. The leader of the war-party got first pick. Clovis was sacrificing his rightful share so as to restore the vase to the Church. Some boorish soldier- perhaps prejudiced against the Church- smashes it. He does not say that the King, or 'elected General', does not have a preeminent right. Why? It wasn't true. Anyway, the dude was a King. Foucault  has the vase-smasher affirm this himself. The fact is the King's property is not stuff anybody else is allowed to smash.  In this particular case, the subtext is a suspicion or hatred of the Church. Clovis does not react because the time was not yet ripe. True, in the sort run, he may have benefited by picking some other prize. But that is a different type of  discussion to what Foucault has invented. This is a story about the pagan suspicion of Christianity which, presumably, was overcome as the invaders became familiar with the Church. 

Clovis and his Burgundian wife, the Saint Clotilde, were Catholic and thus gained support from the Eastern Empire against Arian Gothic tribes. Hilary of Poitiers- 'the hammer of the Arians'- may be seen as the champion of Catholicism in France as expressed by an old, Gaulo-Roman, native aristocracy.

Boulainvilliers had a caste interest in emphasizing the supposed rights of his own Frankish ancestors (though the Prince he was descended from was Hungarian and came to France much later) but why should Foucault believe his story? The truth is Clovis became Catholic and Catholicism prevailed and thus the Merovingian line became the foundation of the French Monarchy.  No doubt, all sorts of noblemen and clergymen and soldiers of fortune turned up at different times to serve the Crown while others fell by the wayside. However, what was not possible was the creation of anything of the Roman type. That would have required the creation of a standing army and colonies for ex-soldiers to populate. The truth is, the successor to the Western Roman Empire was the Roman Catholic Church. 

Altogether, we must conclude that Foucault, in refusing to accept that Religion is what matters in an 'Age of Faith',  wholly misunderstands and distorts  the

This is crazy shit. Lex Salica-Salic law- i.e. that of Clovis- was based on the family, not the individual. Homicide was a property crime requiring the payment of blood money 

Consider the unique Frankish custom called the Chrenecruda, an incredibly important ritual for a free man who killed another man and who did not have enough money to pay the weregild. Under Salic Law it was the legal right of families to feud and pursue an injury done to its honor, even with death. This meant criminals had to appeal to the law and pay fines for protection from a vengeful family, and no situation was more dire than when a murder occurred. When a murderer couldn’t afford to pay the weregild he performed the Chrenecruda ritual. First, the guilty man had to assemble 12 sworn witnesses to profess that he had no wealth left to give. Next, the guilty man had to go to his house and collect dust from each of the four corners. He then threw some of that dust over his left shoulder and onto the nearest relative, who would have to pay the weregild. If that person didn’t have enough money, he would have to keep throwing dust until he hit enough relatives that could pay. And if those relatives couldn’t pay then they would have to throw dust until they hit a relative who could pay. But if all the relatives couldn’t pay the weregild then the murderer would have to submit himself under the protection of his friends who would pay. But if neither family or friend could pay, then the man’s life was forfeit.

Thus, when Clovis bashed in the head of the soldier it was either because the soldier's family couldn't avenge him or because Clovis's killing and paying for that pleasure was an ostentatious type of consumption. 

Christianity broke the link between the individual and the family in a manner similar to the 'Hlaford'- the 'loaf lord'- who ransoms you from vengeance. Christ, of course, was the supreme loaf lord who ransomed you from Hell. 

But what is eternally true of the World to come is slow to come about here below. The original right is that of proactive self defense which extends to the prolonged and collective  pleasures of vendetta. The original 'tit for tat' strategy meant that you are obliged to retaliate against anyone who isn't actively pursuing vengeance for any injury inflicted on them and theirs. That's what ensures the ubiquity of deterrence.  Such is the solution to the underlying coordination game. Oikos has to be linked to thymos.  The 'bourgeois strategy' is vendetta but this is a bourgeoisie which will always remain poor. Thankfully, where there is a coordination game, there will also be a discoordination game such that hedging and Income effects obtain. Enter the market maker.

I have said one way to avoid vendetta was by enlisting under a Loaf Lord who discharged all your obligations and transgressions. That is what the Lord's Prayer meant to Franks and Gauls and Angles and Saxons. The 'Hlaford' or Loaf Lord gives you your daily bread and when guys turn up saying they have to kill you coz one of your clan killed one of theirs then the Loaf Lord settles things. Indeed, he is smart enough to make a profit on it because every viable clan owes and is owed similar weregild. This is an arbitrage opportunity. The market maker nets out accounts for a profit. The Loaf Lord also gets the labour and gratitude of the 'broken men', from unviable clans, who aren't in a position to keep up the honour of their sept. 

The problem is that, if non-convexities arise- i.e. economies of scope and scale become available- a 'natural' monopoly will be established. Price or Service provision discrimination enables extraction of more rent without loss of scale economies. Thus, we find some people get more protection from the Law or the army etc than others. Power is costly to exercise. But exercising it yields a rent. This means that those with a high enough threat point or nuisance potential can get it to work for them for free.

Does Power have anything to do with Truth? No. It may be interested in what David Lewis called 'Conventions'- i.e. solutions to coordination problems like driving on one side of the road rather than another. It may also be interested in intentions or plans or patterns of behaviour. But it is not concerned with the truth. Power may want you to say one thing rather than another even if the thing is an obvious and stupid lie. Justice may make some more 'intensional' claim- i.e. one which of a conceptual sort such that there is an internal logic or criteria of admissibility- as may Art and Science and Religion and so forth but Power makes no such 'intensional' claim. There is a well specified 'extension' regarding what you are expected to say or do which is determined by the wielder of Power. 

No Nation State says that its representatives are interested in the truth or that they will always speak the full truth. 

Foucault, however, thought that power wants truth and gets it through a 'right'.

Political philosophy could be associated with Power. Every totalitarian regime has its official philosophers or else the Benevolent Leader is himself described as a great Sage. But Might- the naked exercise of power- creates their right. It has no other existence. Nobody in their right mind would think that the confessions extracted from Stalin- that great philosopher's- victims were truthful. I suppose some truthful information of a useful type was extracted by power. But the object was utility not truth. 

Power is not interested in producing discourses of truth. It may pay for scientific or other alethic research where truth is utility. It may pay for propaganda and polemics and 'political philosophy'- but it doesn't want them to be truthful at all. 

Foucault was writing about France in the Nineteen Seventies. Did any Frenchmen really believe that the French Police and the French Foreign Ministry and so forth were interested solely in the truth or that power was exercised strictly in accordance with rights? No, but it may be that the sort of people who attended Foucault's lectures at the College de France felt professionally obliged to pretend otherwise

Jurisprudence, not Philosophy, is concerned with protocol bound processes in which determinations of fact are made. In the Anglo Saxon tradition, this is done separately- by a Jury made up of ordinary people- unless both sides stipulate otherwise. In France, Judges do more than decide what law applies, they may uncover facts as well. Still, it is not Truth but what is useful in the context which matters. Witnesses swear to tell the full truth but are sharply rebuked if they consider this an invitation to mention all the filthy thoughts and foul farts that were concurrent to the events about which they are testifying. 

What is it which underlies all Social relationships? A Biologist might say that the answer has to do with the Price equation. An Economist may speak of Utility and Resource constraints. A Priest may speak of God. A Hippy may speak of Peace and Love. A paranoid nutter who fantasizes about being tortured and sodomized by a dominant gimp while confessing to want to eat his own shit may babble brokenly of Power and Truth and Repression and Dominance. 

Foucault's domain is 'the rules of power'- though there is only such rule, viz. use it or lose it save where you'd lose it if you tried to use it- and the power of discourse- which is zero if the thing is useless. 

Surely the general principle that guides us is that might is right as far as power is concerned. Without might there is no power. The powerless may claim all sort of rights but what good does it do them? 

True, we have judicial regimes which may have a notion of fundamental rights. But these are ahistorical. They are not derived from Ancient Rome or Medieval Kings. 

There are various theories of rights but 'positive law'- i.e. law as command- is the only one which might be historicist. In America, there is 'originalism' but- obviously- it is concerned with the intentions of the founding fathers of the Republic. However, rights theories are not concerned with how sovereignty arises. Either the thing exists or it doesn't. We recognize the sovereignty of nations whose regime is repugnant to us. Laws enacted by a previous, now reviled, regime are not automatically over turned. However, the way in which they are used may be reversed. 

No system of rights was centred on the King. This was obvious because there were periods when there was no King or two or three Kings. Some stupid academics may have pretended there was a problem with some shite they had made up but nobody gave a toss about them. 

The folk theorem of repeated games expresses the common sense view that anything achievable by coercion is achievable by consent. What's more, since the cost of coercion is eliminated, more can be done with given resources. No doubt, paranoid nutters might say 'domination is being masked'. People only have sex with their lovers because rape is being masked. Restaurants only exist coz cannibalism is being masked. Why would people gather together to dine? Obviously, what they really want to do is to eat each other. But, and this is what will blow your mind, they actually do eat each other! They just don't notice. They think they are tucking into steak or lobster but they are actually biting off chunks of each others' flesh! Then, to add insult to injury, the restaurant charges them an arm and a leg! You see, that's how Capitalism works! It's like biopolitics- right? We are actually eating each other but paying Olive Garden shedloads of money for the privilege!

Olive Garden think it has the right to demand money from diners who were actually eating each other's flesh. But that right was itself founded upon the polymorphous perversity of the tables and chairs which had violated us in every one of our orifices while saying 'you like that don't you? you fucking retard bitch'. Obviously we're going to need to take some precautions as we research this. I suggest we shove champagne corks up our buttholes so as to prevent polymorphously perverse items of furniture penetrating us in a hideously non-consensual manner. 

Foucault's blindness to Religion causes him not just to misunderstand the meaning of the story of the vase of Soissons. It also leads him to completely misunderstand English history- in 1976 he tells the College de France- 

In England there was conflict over Religion not Race. Normans had disappeared long ago.  The Tudors were an indigenous dynasty associated with Wales while the Stuarts were Scottish. However, Kings had been native English speakers since the time of Henry IV. Discriminatory laws against 'indigenous' English disappeared during the thirteenth and fourteenth century- e.g. the Engleschrie Act of 1340. However, it is true that Lawyers and Parliamentarians began to argue that Magna Carta had reconfirmed the immemorial rights of the Englishman as against the monarch. A problem did arise when James I came down from Scotland because Scotland had, and has, a different legal system. The story is James wanted to execute a criminal caught in the act. It was explained to him that English law prevented the King from acting arbitrarily. The criminal would be hanged but only after he had been afforded due process of law. As Sir Edward Coke explained, England (whose Common Law he asserted derived from Greek speaking Druids!) had 'artificial reason', not natural or Roman Law. In other words, it was protocol bound and had its own 'buck stopping' mechanism.

The Stuarts were 'foreign' in one sense but nobody was saying they did not speak English or were as foreign as the French or the Danes or the Normans. Nor were they saying that 'absolutism' had obtained for many centuries because it simply hadn't. Everybody knew as much history as Shakespeare depicts in his Chronicle plays. What is odd is that Foucault and his audience were wholly ignorant of all this. 

The plain and simple fact is that English Kings were beheaded or chased away if they were married to or otherwise soft on Catholics. One reason they might want to go in a Romish direction was so as to get money from a Catholic power rather than have to rely on Parliament. But Parliament was not interested in the poor. It was a rich man's club which objected to paying taxes for things which didn't make them richer. 

 In England, for centuries now, we have thought of both the Monarchy and the Law as essentially service industries- we pay the Crown and the Bench well to do a useful job. The late Duke of Edinburgh referred to the Royal Family as 'the firm'- it was an enterprise paid to perform certain services which, during the course of the Eighties, became increasingly undignified but addictively entertaining. The Bench, in England & Wales, choosing not to remain the butt of Monty Python type satire and fearing to take on the Tabloid press which could not understand why Judges didn't simply sentence every oik that came before it to being hanged, drawn and quartered, decided to get rid of the offense of 'contempt of court'. In Scotland the offense of 'murmuring Judges' remains but English Judges understood that, by admitting they had no power to protect themselves and thus were tradesmen simply, they would be left alone.

France, of course, never really understood the notion of limited monarchy or how that might turn into constitutional monarchy of a gemutlich kind. Foucault, certainly, remained dazzled by a Sun King who considered any emulation of Anglo Saxon Law & Economics as a type of lese majeste. 

In his History of Sexuality, Foucault writes- 'In thought and political analysis, we have still not cut off the head of the king.' But, though phrase-making may be French, Thought is English and considers the King's head or tail to be but two sides of what really matters- namely coin. 

Foucault claimed, in a lecture given in Brazil in 1976, that the West had no means of representing or analyzing power save in terms of the law. Yet, power had always been understood in the English speaking world as a function of wealth considered as any type of differential endowment. The very notion of an unconscionable contract hinges on one side having superior bargaining power. But determining whether such power exists is an empirical matter. A Jury must make a determination of the facts. The Judge merely clarifies that if superior power obtained and was misused, either at the time of negotiation or with respect to subsequent outcome, then the contract can't be enforced in good conscience. 

In France, a Court could arrive at the same conclusion by saying a contract must have an 'objective cause'- a raison d'etre- and it was unreasonable to suppose this did not involve reciprocity. I need hardly say this is very un-English. The notion that two people must have a reason for transacting business is utterly unreasonable in a dank and melancholy island where any violation of solitude is made bearable only by sweet tea and polite tedium.

In any case, whether appealing to French 'objective cause', or English 'conscience', the law clearly considered power to be something empirical and ideographic, not intensional or nomothetic, and held that proof of its unjust exercise voided a contract. 

In France, there was a growing feeling that the Napoleonic Code re. Contract law was obsolete. More and more firms elected for their contracts to be justiciable in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions. France was slipping down the 'ease of doing business' table. The French did finally reform their Contract law some years ago but there are still some characteristic differences from English jurisprudence. In France there is a general duty to negotiate or perform a contract in good faith whereas the English have been wary of going down this road. Similarly the duty to disclose information is stronger in France. Essentially, the English feel that a business deal is no better than it should be. France clings to the hope that the two contracting parties approach each other clothed in purity and in truth. On the other hand, unlike the purlieus of the Thames, the banks of the Seine are blighted by nimbly hopping notaries, blithely bounding after frogs, hoping to bite their legs off. 

I suppose one could say, if one were that way inclined, that the opposite of law is war. Politics can certainly change the law as it can start or stop war. But it would be foolish to speak of either as being merely the continuation of politics. Clausewitz little wotted that Wars might not merely cause Prussia to wax or wane, it might cause it to disappear as a political force. Where now is the Junker caste? 

Mathematical Game theory can give a representation to both Legal and Military strategies and tactics. But, if Knightian uncertainty obtains, it is evolutionary game theory, featuring co-evolved processes, which has salience. Thus the 'absolute metaphor' for both Law and War is to be found in the Life Sciences. This is not the case for Politics because it is itself the self-conscious attempt to mediate what is seen as a bunch of co-evolving processes. One could say the same thing for Foucault's shite, or indeed this last paragraph of mine. Since we aint actually solving an actual problem, we are like, unlike the more prestigious type of French notary, merely hopping around vainly without ever taking a bite out of the legs of imaginary frogs.