But Duby goes beyond the banal interpretation. In more than four hundred exceptionally closely argued pages, tracing the vicissitudes of this idea of the Carolingian period at the end of the twelfth century (and only in France), he discovers that this model of the ordering of society is never repeated exactly. It reappears often, but with the terms arranged differently; sometimes, instead of a triangular form, it takes on a four-point shape; the words chosen to designate this party or that are changed, sometimes milites are spoken of, sometimes they are called pugnatores, sometimes cavaliers; sometimes, instead of clergy, the word is monks; sometimes they speak of farmers, sometimes simply of workers, sometimes of merchants.
The fact is that over a period of three centuries numerous evolutions of European society took place, and different alliances came into play: between the urban clergy and the feudal lords, to oppress the populace; between clergy and populace to escape the pressure of the knights; between monks and feudal lords against the urban clergy; between urban clergy and national monarchies; between national monarchies and great monastic orders. . . .
The list could continue to infinity. To us Duby’s book is like what a study of the relations between the Christian Democrats, the United States, the Italian Communist Party, and the Italian Manufacturers’ Association in our century might seem to a reader in the year 3000. So you quickly realize that things are not always as clear as they look, that categorical expressions such as “opening to the left” or “economic development” take on different meanings not only as they pass from Andreotti to Craxi, but also within the confines of a Christian Democrat Party conference and in the space of two elections. Those medieval polemics which seemed so clear to us, with such well-defined party ploys, are actually very subtle. And the fact that Duby’s book is so dense, so fascinating and boring at the same time, so difficult to unravel, lacking immediately comprehensible summarizations, is almost justified, because it puts before us a flux of sticky maneuvers.
At a given moment, the Cluniac monk speaks of division among clerics, cavaliers, and peasants, but seems to stir up the specter of a four-part division, adding to the tripartite axis (which is concerned with earthly life) a binary axis that involves the supernatural life, and where the previous trio is set against the monks, who are mediators with the next world. The game is then ever so slightly altered and there is the hint of the domination that the monastic orders want to assume over the other three orders, in which the urban clergy would perform a purely vicarious function, and direct relations would be established between monasteries and feudal structure.
It happens that each of these formulas, so similar and yet so different, is structured on a network of relationships of strength: The knights sack the countryside, the populace seeks support and tries to defend the produce of the land, but among the populace are already emerging those who own their own property and tend to redirect the situation to their own advantage, and so on.
These relationships of strength, however, would remain purely aleatory if they were not disciplined by a power structure in which everyone is consentient and prepared to recognize himself as part of that structure. To this end, there intervenes rhetoric, the ordering and modelizing function of language, which with infinitesimal shifts of accent legitimizes certain relationships of strength and criminalizes others. Ideology takes shape: The power born from it becomes truly a network of consensus, beginning from below, because the relationships of strength have been transformed into symbolic relationships.
At this point in my reading of texts so different, an opposition between power and strength is outlined, an opposition that seems to me totally erased in the talk we hear every day now, in the school, the factory, the ghetto, about power. As we know, since ’68 criticism of power and protest against it have greatly deteriorated, because they have become mass-produced. An inevitable process and we will not repeat (with a fine reactionary stance) that when a concept arrives within everyone’s grasp it crumbles, and so it should have remained the property of a few. On the contrary, it is precisely because it had to be within everyone’s grasp, though in the process it would risk crumbling, that the criticism of its degenerations becomes important.
So then, in mass political discussion of power there have been two ambiguous phases: the first, ingenuous, in which power had a center (the System, like an evil boss with a moustache who, at the keyboard of a maleficent computer, taps out the perdition of the working class). This idea has been sufficiently criticized, and Foucault’s notion of power intervenes, in fact, to show its anthropomorphic naïveté. A trace of this revision of the concept can be found even in the internal contradictions of various terrorist groups: from those who want to strike at the “heart” of the state to those who, on the contrary, unravel the strands of power at its edge, in the points I would call “Foucaultian,” where the prison guard, the petty merchant, the foreman are engaged.
But the second phase remains more equivocal; here strength and power are all too easily confused. I speak of “strength” instead of causality, which would come to me more spontaneously, for reasons that we will see; but we can begin at once with a fairly ingenuous notion of causality. There are things that cause other things: The stroke of lightning burns the tree; the male member inseminates the female uterus.
These relationships are not reversible: The tree does not burn the stroke of lightning, and woman does not inseminate man. There are, on the other hand, relationships where somebody makes somebody else do things because of a symbolic relationship: The man decides that in the home the woman washes the dishes; the Inquisition decides that heretics will be burned at the stake and assumes the right to define heresy. These relationships are based on a strategy of language that, once labile relationships of strength are recognized, institutionalizes them symbolically, achieving consensus from the dominated. Symbolic relationships are reversible. In principle the woman has only to say no to the man and he will have to wash the dishes, the heretics reject the authority of the Inquisition and they will not be burned.
Naturally, things are not that simple, precisely because the discourse that symbolically represents power must deal not with simple causal relations but with complex interaction of forces. Still this seems to me the difference between power, as symbolic fact, and pure causality: The former is reversible, the latter is only capable of being contained or bridled, it allows reforms (I invent the lightning rod; the woman decides to go on the pill, to renounce sexual relations, to have only homosexual relations). The inability to distinguish between power and causality leads to much childish political behavior. As we have seen, things are not all that simple. Let’s replace the notion of causality (onedirectional) with that of force.
A force is applied to another force: They form a parallelogram of forces. They do not cancel one another; they are composed, according to a law. The play among forces is reformist: It produces compromises. But the game is never between two forces, it is among countless forces; the parallelogram gives rise to far more complex multidimensional figures. To decide which forces must be set against which other forces, decisions are made which are dependent not on the play of forces but on the play of power. A knowledge is produced, of the composition of forces.
To return to Duby: When knights exist, when the merchants appear on the scene with their wealth, when the peasants start migrating towards the city under the scourge of famine, you are dealing with forces: The symbolic strategy, the formulation of convincing theories of the three orders or the four, and thence the configuration of power relationships come into play in defining which forces must restrain which others, and in what direction the consequent parallelograms must march. But in Duby’s book, at least for the idle reader, the play of forces risks disappearing in the face of the dominant argument, which is made up by the constant rearrangement of the symbolic figures.
We come to the last book in the pile, War in European History* Michael Howard’s study of weapons in the development of European history. We will speak of it only obliquely, inviting the reader to enjoy for himself this fascinating book that starts with the wars of the feudal period and arrives at those of the nuclear age, with a wealth of anecdote and unpredictable discoveries. In 1346, at Crecy, Edward III introduces, against the enemy cavalry, his longbow archers. These longbows, which shoot five or six arrows in the same time that a crossbow could fire only one of its large darts, engage a new force
