“The CIA reads Foucault” - Foucault’s fourth adventure

 July 11, 2022

Foucault's pantomime character of the young monk now has to go out to get wine. And this is complicated to the heart, although relatively straightforward to action.

The preparation and learning here regards the state - at this point represented by the literature the modern Foucault points to here: the "Mirrors for Princes" literature.

This is the first subtext.

The state does the best alcohol, but it needs to be avoided. The reason is more than an esoteric reason about the state brewing and fermenting alcohol for its own purposes and intentions - Since the ancient Sumerian city-states, the state has had a hand in the brewing and fermentation of alcohol: this is true. And they have done it through incidental mercantilism or intentional mercantilism: when prices are low, it's easy to brew grains into beer. But the Church and monastery has already taken an ethical stance in favor of physiocracy: of keeping grain prices high. And not to mention that, the real problem is no one is going to take the Eucharist in beer.

So the real problematic here being considered is not grain use, but land use. Under a mercantilist system, low grain prices might cause farmers to grow grapes on land otherwise used for growing grain. But this is not something that accords with the economic policy the medieval church has selected to support. Physiocracy desires high prices for grain and abundant grain supply. So the market intervention that the monastic system will do is to purchase from grapes grown on the most marginal land possible - the land most unfit for any other purpose.

This is a moral choice by the monastery system.

The choice has to be justified by some to the principal apparatus of sovereignty in the region, and ths can become contentious, because it can eat into profits they thought they could make by growing "non-grains on grain lands" (not a quote). But the response is something like sovereignty "is made more acute than ever".

Part of the reason sovereignty will be made "more acute than ever" is the discovery that is part of this logistical nexus of procuring wine, which disallows any pretension to the confluence of ignorance and idealism that has been "the gadfly of the state" based on the insistence of questioning whether sovereignty has considered Very Basic Questions.

The strategy of this figure is to say "have you considered these basic questions, because it looks like what you're doing is arbitrary." And the response is a simple one: "And what have you been doing that you would say so." By Analogy - where have you been buying your wine? And to this the ignorant can never answer satisfactorily enough to support his full claim.

The State as the "coldest of cold monsters" - that trope from Nietzsche - is still a concern and a terror, but not out of concern and fear from its possible ignorance but out of the degree to which the operation of the State may be arbitrary relative to the thought and preferences of the people: not that it is ignorant.

The contra to the standard of the "Mirror for Princes" literature is to investigate notthe relationship between the Prince and his territory but between the Prince and the population.

We can also think back to how the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forests exposed this very problematic in medieval England - the Prince relating to the population as "part of the landscape". And we can wonder at the Church's unwillingness to let out this information even to democratic governments. This is why nihilism is an expose, etc.

Foucault's young quartermaster-to-be returns with this report and some crude wine. Very crude wine - very moral. The report is that he is now concerned with what are the very specific instruments through which the art of government does its operation.