Stuart Elden - Foucault, Shakespeare and the question of territory

Foucault thinks that territory was much more of a focus of politics in the medieval period, but this has been supplanted by this interest of government over population in a more modern period. Shakespeare also offers a lot of material that can help us to think about those kinds of questions.

About Stuart Elden "I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. My research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. I undertake my work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas.

My work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought. I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault. I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory."

Key Points

• Foucault makes the claim that in the 17th century there is a shift from the object of government being over territory to government becoming the population. • What I suggest, however, is that the modern notion of territory is produced around the same time as the modern notion of population. • Shakespeare offers a lot of material that can help us to think about questions regarding economic, political and legal aspects of territory. “Historically misleading” When I was doing my work on the history of the concept and practice of territory, I was very influenced by the way that Foucault had done some of his historical work. I was interested in exploring the relation between a word, a concept and a practice of territory. Foucault, along with some other thinkers, was really powerful for me in terms of how we might do a history of a concept through these different times, these different places.

I could never have written The Birth of Territory without having done the work on Foucault and being inspired by the approach that he suggests. And yet, in that book, I suggest that almost everything that Foucault says about the question of territory is, at best, historically misleading.

Foucault: territory and population Foucault makes the claim, in some of his lecture courses, that what we’ve seen around the 17th century is a shift from a concentration of the object of government being over territory to the object of government becoming the population. Foucault suggests that you can see this in a whole range of ways in which the population becomes the object, the thing to which governmental practices are directed.

Foucault claims you can see that in the development of statistics. You can see it in things like birth and death rates, the health of the population, crop yields – these kinds of questions. He thinks that population then becomes the focus of politics. Foucault thinks that territory was much more of a focus of politics in the medieval period, but this has been supplanted by this interest of government over population in a more modern period.