THE POLITICS OF MICHEL FOUCAULT

...Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney, Australia: Feral, 1979), p. 60...

...I believe that he makes arguments (even, in some large sense, an argument) and that he has a purpose...

...Their "discourse" takes a very different form: they describe the brutality of the prison authorities or the inhumanity of prison conditions, and they complain of punishments that go far beyond those to which they were legally condemned...

...Sexuality, p. 96...

...1" Power/Knowledge, p. 142...

...nor are their representatives...

...The result has been a deep split between this campaign with its monotonous, lyrical little chant, heard only among a few small groups, and the masses who have good reason not to accept it as valid political currency...

...Discipline and Punish, p. 223...

...at least (and this is not the same thing), it has anti-Leninist implications...

...it was replaced by sociology, psychology, criminology, and so on...

...Consider— (1) that discipline-in-detail, the precise control of behavior, is necessary to the (unspecified) large-scale features of contemporary social and economic life...

...But each of these campaigns must still take place within the overall discipline of language and the rules of plausibility (if not of Truth...

...or new codes and disciplines will be produced, and Foucault gives us no reason to expect that these will be any better than the ones we now live with...

...It follows that power isn't merely repressive but also creative (even if all it creates is, say, the science of penology...

...Foucault nicely finesses the "legitimation crisis" so hotly debated on the other side of the Rhine...

...But this was not all capitalism required...

...How is he constituted as sovereign...

...Foucault's political argument starts with the following two-part proposition, the second part largely unstated because it is so entirely accepted on the French intellectual left: (1) the king is the actual ruler, the visible, effective, necessary agent, the concrete embodiment of political power in the monarchic state...

...and similarly, knowledge isn't merely ideological but also true...

...Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans...

...Foucault refuses to do either of these things, and that refusal, which makes his genealogies so powerful and so relentless, is also the catastrophic weakness of his political theory...

...And yet, of course, there was such a center, if not always visible or self-conscious or highly organized: law and policy had a shape, corresponded to a set of interests...

...And success was functional not to any state but to a state of that sort...

...He doesn't believe in a democratic revolution, for the demos doesn't exist in his political world...

...4) and finally, that the complex of disciplinary mechanisms and institutions constitutes and is constituted by the contemporary human sciences—an argument that runs through all of Foucault's work, to which I will return...

...And again: "Power is employed and exercised through a netlike organization...

...Foucault desensitizes his readers to the importance of politics...

...I want to deal instead with his political theory—though he also insists that he doesn't have a political theory...

...And indeed there have been reforms (in this country at least, but I suspect in Europe too): new laws about consent, confidentiality, access to records...

...And yet sometimes, not in his books but in the interviews —and especially in a series of interviews of the early 1970s, which still reflect the impact of May '68—Foucault seems to see a grand alternative: the dismantling of the whole thing, the fall of the carceral city, not revolution but abolition...

...4 The comparison won't stand up with regard to insight or lucidity, only with regard to the general views of the two writers...

...hence the state was rightful and a defender of rights...

...He is, in the world of political knowledge, what the king is in the world of political power...

...By denying the existence of a directing center, it robbed radical politics of its object...

...Elections, parties, and assemblies are entirely absent in Foucault's "discourse of power," and the absence is eloquent...

...140-141...

...But whatever this larger system is, it isn't the political system, the regime or constitution...

...21 Power/Knowledge, p. 130...

...What bond of obedience ties individuals to the sovereign...

...Foucault seems to disbelieve in principle in the existence of a dictator or a party or a state that shapes the character of disciplinary institutions...

...This doesn't mean that behavior is more routinized or predictable (it isn't), but that it is more intimately subjected to rules, standards, schedules, and authoritative inspections...

...It is a nice model, though perhaps a little too easy...

...But strategic knowledge implies to my mind a coherent view of reality and a sense of purpose, and it is on these two things that I will focus: first, on Foucault's account of contemporary power relationships and their history or "genealogy," and second, on his attitude toward these relationships and his purpose in writing about them...

...Every human society has its own discipline, and in every society above a certain size this discipline is exercised at microas well as macro-levels...

...We are all counted, numbered, classified, catalogued, polled, interviewed, watched, and filed away...

...or perhaps, and this is after all a traditional view of tradi483 tional societies, habitual routines and customary rules worked with little more than intermittent coercion...

...I am indeed worried," he says, "by a certain use that is made of the Gulag-Internment parallel...

...Power, Truth, Strategy, ed...

...Some 15 years ago in an article on the welfare state, I argued that the most impressive feature of modern welfare administration is the sheer variety of its coercive and deterrent instruments...

...In fact, this is not quite what Foucault does...

...the carceral continuum is validated by the knowledge of human subjects that it makes possible...

...I might sum up the argument to come by comparing Foucault to his great antagonist in the world of political theory, Thomas Hobbes...

...Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 145...

...We can't understand contemporary society or our own lives, he argues, unless we look hard and close at this kind of power and at these people: not state or class or corporate power, not the proletariat or the people or the toiling masses, but hospitals, asylums, prisons, armies, schools, factories...

...Sexuality, pp...

...Political interventions were dramatic but occasional—like those horrifying punishments Foucault describes in the opening section of Discipline and Punish, which made royal power visible and were entirely consistent with a generally ineffective system of law enforcement...

...But his argument does seem to suggest that every act of resistance at every micro-setting of the carceral continuum, whatever its motives, is a "pure rebellion" against the continuum as a whole—and one with which he is always ready to sympathize...

...For it is Foucault's claim, and I think he is partly right, that the discipline of a prison, say, represents a continuation and intensification of what goes on in more ordinary places—and wouldn't be possible if it didn't...

...Every newly recognized need, every service received, creates a new dependency and a new social bond...

...They are standard for any relativism...

...He is, after all, in search of strategic, not merely tactical, knowledge...

...Exactly wrong: the Bolsheviks created a new regime that overwhelmed the old hierarchies and enormously expanded and intensified the use of disciplinary techniques...

...So I take him to be saying something we are invited to believe —and then to disbelieve its opposite, that is, "to detach the power of truth from the forms of hegemony . . . within which it operates at the present time...

...Nor, for that matter, does he give us any way of knowing what "better" might mean...

...This is his argument: social life is discipline squared...

...So great minds are subdued...

...126ff...

...No one is entirely free from these new forms of social control...

...This latter...

...Power/Knowledge: p. 187...

...He is not an advocate...

...3) that the prison is only one small part of a highly articulated, mutually reinforcing carceral continuum extending across society, in which all of us are implicated, and not only as captives or victims...

...The agents of every disciplinary institution strive, of course, to extend their reach and augment their discretionary power...

...even [the] recognition of individuals—our hardwon visibility—becomes a source of intensified control...

...Theorists still try to answer the Hobbist questions, which Foucault puts this way: "What is the sovereign...

...For the Americans, power was dispersed to individuals and groups and then recentralized, that is, brought to bear again at the focal point of sovereignty...

...but as if by an invisible hand, all its parts are somehow fitted together...

...Hobbes thought that political sovereignty was a literal necessity—else life was nasty, brutish, and short...

...E Power/Knowledge: p. 193...

...Foucault can be read, and not inaccurately, as a pluralist...

...but (2) the people are not the rulers and not the embodiments of power in the 0 ...mocratic state...

...The function of discipline is to create useful subjects, men and women who conform to a standard, who are certifiably sane or healthy or docile or competent, not free agents who invent their own standards, who, in the language of rights, "give the law to themselves...

...One of Foucault's followers, the author of a very intelligent essay on Discipline and Punish, draws from that book and the related interviews the extraordinary conclusion that the Russian Revolution failed because it "left intact the social hierarchies and in no way inhibited the functioning of the disciplinary techniques...

...The triumph of professional or scientific 485 norms over legal rights and of local discipline over constitutional law is a fairly common theme of contemporary social criticism...

...I won't insist upon them...

...The crucial point of Foucault's political theory is that discipline escapes the world of law and right—and then begins to "colonize" that world, replacing legal principles with principles of physical, psychological, and moral normality...

...These are crude definitions...

...rhetorically inflated and drained of moral distinctions, it nevertheless captures something of the reality of contemporary society...

...there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations...

...Since Foucault never presents it in anything like a systematic fashion, I shall put it together out of his more recent (and more political) books and interviews, ignoring passages that I don't understand, ignoring too his denials and evasions, and refusing to live at the heights of his flamboyance...

...What "good reasons" do ordinary men and women have for discriminating among these acts...

...Rather, there is for him no such thing as a free human subject, no natural man or woman...

...5 There is no general will and no effective coalition of interest groups...

...If he cannot find a state to seize, he still hopes to locate somehow, somewhere, in the complex system of modern society or of the capitalist economy, a comprehensible antagonist...

...This is certainly right and conceivably, in a certain context, brave, but it avoids conceding the truth for which the collective was reaching: that Foucault is not a good revolutionary...

...Foucault sometimes calls this system capitalism, but he also gives it a number of more dramatic names: the disciplinary society, the carceral city, the panoptic regime and, most frightening (and misleading) of all, the carceral archipelago...

...but politics matters...

...Power/Knowledge?E p. 133...

...And so Foucault's radical abolitionism, if it is serious, is not anarchist so much as nihilist...

...But there is more that has to be said...

...The exercise of power, and the acceptance or endurance of power, now occurs somewhere else...

...The truths of jurisprudence and penology, for example, distinguish punishment from preventive detention...

...One form of discipline generates the data that makes the other possible...

...It has given rise to a series of campaigns in defense of the rights of the mentally ill, of prisoners, hospital patients, children (in schools and also in families...

...It does point, though, to a certain sort of coherence...

...This suggests that whatever the value of detailed analyses and critiques of local discipline, we still require—I don't mean that society requires, or capitalism or even socialism requires, but you and I require—what Foucault calls "general intellectuals...

...It is possible," says Foucault, "that the rough outline of a future society is supplied by the recent experiences with drugs, sex, communes, other forms of consciousness, and other forms of individuality...

...Guilt and innocence are the products of law just as normality and abnormality are the products of discipline...

...9 This is not, of course, the same argument that the American pluralists made...

...It requires only the briefest of explanations...

...Power/Knowledge, p. 131...

...In contemporary Western societies, power is dispersed, but not as democrats hoped to disperse it, not to citizens who argue and vote and determine the policies of the central government...

...at any rate, it is an exciting one, and I don't mean to quarrel with it so long as Foucault takes on the disciplines one by one, medicine, psychiatry, criminology, political science, and so on...

...He is not a "general intellectual" of the old sort—so he tells us—who provides an account and critique of society as a whole...

...If power is exercised at innumerable points, then it has to be challenged point by point...

...Sometimes Foucault seems to be committed to nothing more than an elaborate pun on the word "discipline"—which means, on the one hand, a branch of knowledge and on the other, a system of correction and control...

...power is intentional at the tactical level where guard confronts prisoner...

...Sometimes Foucault marvels at the fit: "This is an extremely complex system of relations, which leads one finally to wonder how, given that no one person can have conceived it in its entirety, it can be so subtle in its distribution, its mechanisms, reciprocal controls and adjustments...

...Power, Truth, Strategy, p. 126...

...For Foucault there is no focal point, but rather an endless network of power relations...

...The argument of Hobbes and his theoretical heirs was that subjects created and legitimized their own subjection by ceding (some of) their rights to the state...

...Every act of local resistance is an appeal for political or legal intervention from the center...

...Still, it is exciting to see how the projects proliferate, how similar designs are repeated for different institutions, how the rules and regulations, though they often have the perfectionist character of an antiutopia, as if in anticipation of 1984 or Brave New World, begin nevertheless to suggest the outlines of our everyday lives...

...We need men and women who tell us when state power is corrupted or systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten, and who reiterate the regulative principles with which we might set things right...

...Foucault believes that discipline is necessary for this particular society—capitalist, modern, or whatever...

...In a 1977 interview, he is savagely critical of some of his comrades in "the struggle around the penal system" who have fallen for a whole naive, archaic ideology which makes the criminal...

...The nearest thing to an account of such arrangements comes in an interview first published in November 1971...

...The point is rather that one can't even be downcast, angry, grim, indignant, sullen, or embittered with reason unless one inhabits some social setting and adopts, however tentatively and critically, its codes and categories...

...Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint...

...134, 136-37...

...He has a way of turning on anyone who imitates it or tries to act it out politically, and I am inclined to think it is intended to have descriptive, not normative, force...

...Foucault does not believe, as earlier anarchists did, that the free human subject is a subject of a certain sort, 486 naturally good, warmly sociable, kind and loving...

...doctor, patient...

...Success required not only the solidarity of the workers but also at least some support from the liberal and democratic state...

...Power/Knowledge, p. 62...

...It has to be added, however, that subjection to these new forms is not the same thing as being in prison: Foucault tends systematically to underestimate the difference, and this criticism, which I shall want to develop, goes to the heart of his politics...

...his account is neither surreal nor mysterious...

...The books focus on three or four institutional networks of social discipline, asylums, hospitals, prisons, with side glances at armies, schools, and factories, and it is impossible to read them, whatever disagreements one has, without a sense of recognition...

...Toward this argument, I shall adopt a "constructionist" position...

...He is an antidisciplinarian (his own word), at war with the established intellectual disciplines...

...s So they reveal the genealogical constraints of their enterprise, first worked out to account for a set of power relations that have now collapsed...

...And he certainly doesn't believe in a vanguard revolution: the vanguard is nothing more than the monarch manquê, one more pretender to royal power...

...Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 230...

...25 Power/Knowledge, pp...

...Physical disciplines and intellectual disciplines are radically entangled...

...Many years ago, in a graduate seminar with Barrington Moore, I studied a group of American political scientists and sociologists, called "pluralists," who argued that power was radically dispersed in American society...

...One last assumption, which I had best make explicit since Parisian reputations are not hard currency in the United States today: I assume that my effort is worthwhile, not only because Foucault is influential but also because his account of our everyday politics, though often annoyingly presented and never wholly accurate or sufficiently nuanced, is right enough to be disturbing—and also because it is importantly wrong...

...I was taught that this was a conservative doctrine...

...All the books cited are by Michel Foucault...

...And these descriptions, complaints, denunciations, and demands make an important point...

...T" Language, p. 231...

...We must study the sites where power is physically administered and physically endured or resisted...

...Foucault begins, however, with tactics, with local power relations, with the men and women at the lowest levels of the social hierarchy or, as he would say, caught in the fine meshes of the power networks, with you and me...

...Foucault's books are fictions, he says, but only because the power relations and the disciplinary establishments within which they could be validated don't yet exist.' At the same time, he has many readers who seem to inhabit such establishments, for they take his genealogies to be accurate and even indisputable...

...In any case, Foucault proceeds to generalize it...

...For it is the state that establishes the general framework within which all other disciplinary institutions operate...

...The powerful evocation of the disciplinary system gives way to an antidisciplinarian politics that is mostly rhetoric and posturing...

...In one of those dancelike interviews in which he both takes 484 and doesn't take political positions, Foucault is led to say that the class struggle stands to the local power struggles as their "guarantee of intelligibility...

...What else is possible...

...Citizenship and government alike have been superseded...

...In his account of how sexuality was "constituted" in the 19th century, he writes: This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism...

...Given all this—leave aside for the moment whether it adds up to a fully satisfactory account of our social life—how can Foucault expect anything more than a small reform here or there, an easing of disciplinary rigor, the introduction of more humane, if no less effective, methods...

...They aren't entirely arbitrary, however, insofar as they are intrinsic to the particular disciplines (in both senses of the word...

...Language, p. 227...

...There could be no exercise of discipline, at least no sustained and organized exercise, without disciplinary knowledge...

...Consider, for example, the factory revolts of the 1930s that led (in this country) to the establishment of collective bargaining and grievance procedures, critical restraints on scientific management, which is one of Foucault's disciplines, though one that he alludes to only occasionally...

...But I don't want to end on this last note...

...judicial interventions in the administration of prisons and schools...

...we can easily imagine other "social wholes" that would require other kinds of factory discipline...

...true," and there are mechanisms that enable us to distinguish true and false statements—and sanctions, so that we won't make mistakes...

...In order to understand what that might mean and whether it is possible, we must consider more carefully the forms of social discipline that replace royal power...

...For such an account would require what Foucault always resists: some positive evaluation of the liberal state...

...The same problem of discrimination arises when Foucault confronts young leftists who confuse the carceral archipelago with the Gulag archipelago, a confusion to which Foucault's terminology in this instance and, more generally, the language of all his books, are a perpetual incitement...

...His purpose, he says, is "not to formulate the global systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyze the specificity of mechanisms of power . . . to build little by little a strategic knowledge...

...Not every prison revolt, for there may be some that we have "good reason" not to support...

...The disciplinary society is a society, a social whole, and in his account of the parts of this whole, Foucault is a functionalist...

...He responds in two ways: first by saying, as I have already noted, that his 488 genealogies are fictions waiting for the "political realities" that will make them true...

...This is to make Foucault into a subject, an academic subject, perhaps to impose upon him structures of knowledge that he wants to shatter...

...But I don't see, on Foucault's terms, how it can be validated by resistance until the resistance is successful (and it's not clear what success would mean...

...Foucault has little to say about this sort of thing and is obviously skeptical about its effectiveness...

...Now there is a new subjection, which creates and legitimizes new subjects—not the carriers of rights but of 482 norms, the agents and also the products of moral, medical, sexual, psychological (rather than legal) regulation...

...Foucault believes that truth is relative to its sanctions and knowledge to the constraints that produce it...

...In those prison revolts with which we might rightly sympathize, the prisoners don't in fact call into question the line between guilt and innocence or the truth value of jurisprudence or penology...

...Never have ordinary citizens been so well-known to the public authorities as in the welfare state...

...he is more a theorist than a historian, and the materials out of which he constructs his books consist mostly of the written projects and proposals for these sites, the architectural plans, the handbooks of rules and regulations, rarely of actual accounts of practices and experiences...

...Foucault himself has been deeply involved in prison reform or—I had better be careful—in a political practice with regard to prisons that might give rise to reforms...

...I make a number of assumptions...

...the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomenon of population to economic processes...

...nobody had so much as to be sure of getting his own way all the time...

...He writes in declarative sentences, at least sometimes, though he is fonder of conditional and interrogative forms, so that his arguments often have the character of insinuations...

...There can't be a seizure of power if there is nothing at the center to seize...

...This is another reason, perhaps, why Foucault does not want to call himself a political theorist...

...As the conventional disciplines are generated and validated by the conventional uses of power, so Foucault's antidiscipline is generated by the resistance to those uses...

...Paul Patton, in Power, Truth, Strategy, p. 126...

...Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 94...

...For it does have a general character, even if it isn't governed by a single will...

...He argues from the bottom up, but this is a mode of analysis that suggests, at least by its direction, that the world is not all bottom...

...And it induces regular effects of power.' So for every society, for every historical age, there is a regime of truth, unplanned but functional, generated somehow out of the network of power relations, out of the multiple forms of constraint, and enforced along with them...

...But what will be left...

...It isn't determined by a Hobbist sovereign, shaped by a legislator or a founding convention, controlled through a judicial process...

...They are of the sort I was taught to call, in the political world where I grew up and learned to talk, "infantile leftism," that is, less an endorsement than an outrunning of the most radical argument in any political struggle...

...12 Power/Knowledge, p. 143...

...Authoritarian and totalitarian states, by contrast, override those limits, turning education into indoctrination, punishment into repression, asylums into prisons, and prisons into concentration camps...

...It's for this reason that Foucault's politics are commonly called anarchist, and anarchism certainly has its moments in his thought...

...Here is a kind of knowledge—political philosophy and philosophical jurisprudence— that regulates disciplinary arrangements across our society...

...to what set of power relations is the genealogical antidiscipline connected...

...I don't want to ask Foucault to be uplifting...

...But Foucault has succeeded in extending and dramatizing this view with a series of books that are rather like the king's punishments: rhetorical statements of great power, though often ineffective in what we might think of as scholarly law enforcement—the presentation of evidence, detailed argument, the consideration of alternative views...

...But if it were complete, it would have to include a genealogy of grievance procedures too, and this would overlap with an account, which Foucault doesn't provide, of the liberal state and the rule of law...

...It arises within one set of power relations and extends toward the others...

...Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 271...

...It is the state that holds open or radically shuts down the possibility of local resistance...

...But the set of power relations, the strategic connections, the deep functionalism of power has no subject and is the product of no one's plan...

...Foucault gives us an importantly wrong account of local discipline...

...They set limits on what can rightly be done, and they give shape and conviction to the arguments the prisoners make...

...The limits are important even if they are in some sense arbitrary...

...But perhaps, after all, the demand that Foucault show us the ground on which he stands, display his philosophical warrants, is beside the point...

...I: An Introduction, trans...

...Nor does he provide a genealogy of the Gulag and, what is probably more important, his account of the carceral archipelago contains no hint of how or why our own society stops short of the Gulag...

...Foucault is not the Kafka of the prison or the asylum...

...he too denies the existence of a center...

...But what other victories can he think possible, given his strategic knowledge...

...Here again a comparison with Hobbes is illuminating...

...22 Power/Knowledge, pp...

...Nor does he often use terms like "micro-fascism...

...The complex system within which these functions are carried out is presumably modern industrial society, but Foucault sometimes prefers a more precise name...

...into an innocent victim and a pure rebel...

...489 A genealogical account of this discipline would be fascinating and valuable, and it would undoubtedly overlap with Foucault's accounts of prisons and hospitals...

...and he has students and followers who pursue the research lines he has laid out...

...that is a fact too easily forgotten by conventionally detached scientists, social scientists, and even philosophers...

...I will come back to this sense of recognition, and so to the actual experience of living within the network of disciplines...

...y concern here is not primarily with Michel Foucault's political positions, the statements he has made, the articles he has written, his response to "events"—May '68, the prison revolts of the early '70s, the Iranian revolution, and so on...

...487 And they did this from the heart of the social system and not from what Foucault likes to call the capillaries, from the center and not the extremities...

...2) that this kind of control requires the microsetting, the finely meshed network, the local power relation, represented in ideal-typical fashion by the cellular structure of the prison, the daily timetable of prison events, the extralegal penalties inflicted by prison authorities, the face-to-face encounters of guard and prisoner...

...For Foucault, obviously, the prisoner cannot be an innocent victim, for he has denied the distinction between guilt and innocence...

...Power/Knowledge, p. 98...

...Not that he imagines a social system different from our own, beyond discipline and sovereignty alike: "I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system...

...But he provides no principled distinction, so far as I can see, between the Gulag and the carceral archipelagos...

...In that same interview, with some such vision in mind, he repudiates the likely reformist results of his own prison work: "The ultimate goal of [our] interventions was not to extend the visiting rights of prisoners to 30 minutes or to procure flush toilets for the cells, but to question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the As this last passage suggests, when Foucault is an anarchist, he is a moral as well as a political anarchist...

...He himself resists the incitement and is severely critical of those who succumb...

...Despite his emphasis on local struggles, he is largely uninterested in local victories...

...Foucault is certainly right to say that the conventional truths of morality, law, medicine, and psychiatry are implicated in the exercise of power...

...etc.'s Capitalism gets what it needs, though how the process works Foucault doesn't reveal, and his account of the local uses of power would appear to make the revelation less likely than it might be within a more conventional Marxist theory...

...Though he insists that he doesn't have a political position and doesn't want to be situated on the chessboard of available positions (he doesn't play chess, or any other game whose rules the rest of us might know), he does indeed respond to events, and his statements and articles have a fairly consistent character...

...I take Foucault to be an author in the conventional sense of that term, responsible for the books he writes, the interviews he gives, the lectures published under his name...

...But first I need to say a word about the general character of the network...

...it also needed...

...Men and women are always social creations, the products of codes and disciplines...

...Penology is "constituted" by the prison system in the obvious sense that there could not be a study of prisoners or of the effects of imprisonment if there were no prisons...

...Our interest shifts, because the action shifts, from the singular state to a pluralist society...

...Sometimes he is quite matter of fact: "If the prison institution has survived for so long, with such immobility, if the principle of penal detention has never seriously been questioned, it is no doubt because this carceral system . . . carried out certain very precise functions...

...At other times, Foucault says more simply that his work is made possible by the events of '68 and by subsequent local revolts here and there along the disciplinary continuum...

...That might be a just war...

...The general intellectual belongs to the age of the state and the party, when it still seemed possible to seize power and reconstruct society...

...Foucault is far too intelligent not to have worried about these questions...

...I now want to examine this epistemology, for it is the ultimate source of his anarchism/nihilism...

...I only want to suggest the enormous importance of the political regime, the sovereign state...

...3 I take him to be making an 481 argument that is right or wrong or partly right and partly wrong...

...Knowledge derives from and provides the grounds for social control...

...And the truths of psychiatry distinguish the internment of madmen from the internment of political dissidents...

...He is focused instead on what he thinks of as the "micro-fascism" of everyday life and has little to say about authoritarian or totalitarian politics —that is, about the forms of discipline that are most specific to his own lifetime...

...No one designed the whole, and no one controls it...

...For on his own arguments, either there will be nothing left at all, nothing visibly human...

...Foucault is concerned not with the dispersion of power to the extremities of the political system, but with its exercise at the extremities...

...There would appear to be no independent standpoint, no possibility for the development of critical principles...

...When the king's head was cut off, the theory of the state died too...

...Again: "At every moment, power is in play in small individual parts...

...But those same truths also regulate the exercise of power...

...The overthrow of these micro-powers does not obey the law of all or nothing.' "There is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case...

...every particular form of social control rests on and makes possible a particular form of knowledge...

...Power relations, he says, "are both intentional and nonsubjective.'"' I don't know what that sentence means, but I think that the contradictory words are intended (nonsubjectively...

...Each present invents its own past, but Foucault has invented a past for some future present...

...Many writers before Foucault have suggested that we live in a more disciplined society than has ever existed before...

...critique is frequent in left-wing groups and its employment is part of the mechanism of microterrorism by which they have often operated...

...individuals circulate between its threads...

...We must eschew the model of Leviathan," Foucault says, "in the study of power...

...Once we have cut off the king's head, power and knowledge alike take different forms...

...Of course, one can ask the obvious questions: what is Foucault's standpoint...

...I Power/Knowledge: p. 102...

...Discipline makes discipline possible (the order of the two nouns can be reversed...

...E Power/Knowledge: p. 188...

...I don't believe that he can do that, not so long as he is also committed to rejecting any sort of liberalism that "sanctifies basic rights" and to blurring the line between guilt and innocence...

...For he makes no demands on us that we adopt this or that critical principle or replace these disciplinary norms with some other set of norms...

...2 ' Sexuality, p. 94...

...They are bolstered in any case by extensive footnotes and a rather erratic but (he assures us) painstaking documentation...

...This is the area of Foucault's strongest work, and it is strong even though, or perhaps because, it offers us no "guarantee of intelligibility...

...IV I have suggested that all micro-forms of discipline are functional to a larger system...

...A liberal state is one that maintains the limits of its constituent disciplines and disciplinary institutions and that enforces their intrinsic principles...

...And the code by which this machinery operates is a scientific, not a legal code...

...Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared...

...490...

...He supported every sort of sovereignty, and so for him tyranny was nothing more than "monarchy misliked...

...For him morality and politics go together...

...Power comes from below...

...At this point, it seems to me, Foucault's position is simply incoherent...

...V I s Foucault then committed to his anarchism/ nihilism...

...At the same time, penology provides both the rationale and the intellectual structure of the prison system...

...He isn't a good revolutionary because he doesn't believe in the sovereign state or the ruling class, and therefore he doesn't believe in the take-over of the state or the replacement of the class...

...They demand the introduction and enforcement of what we might best call the rule of law...

...To abolish power systems is to abolish both moral and scientific categories: away with them all...

...What this intelligibility might mean in his thought is a question that I am not going to reach here...

...l" Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays & Interviews, ed...

...Some kind of functionalist Marxism, nonetheless, provides the distant underpinning of Foucault's account of power...

...In fact, I think, these things make all the difference...

...We are to withdraw our belief in, say, the truth of penology and then support . . . what...

...it offers a critical perspective on all the networks of constraint...

...I will do what I always do with any book I read: try to puzzle out what the author is saying...

...So we all live to a time schedule, get up to an alarm, work to a rigid routine, live in the eye of authority, are periodically subject to examination and inspection...

...That is not the task he has set himself...

...Perhaps human freedom requires a nonfunctionalist society whose arrangements, whatever they are, serve no larger purpose and have no redeeming social value...

...This state still exists, more or less, but it merely "conceals" the "actual procedures of power," "the mechanisms of disciplinary coercion," which operate beyond the effective reach of the law...

...There are certain types of discourse that the society accepts "and makes...

...he abhors all its forms, every sort of confinement and control, and so for him liberalism is nothing more than discipline concealed...

...This begins to sound like a reformist politics, and Foucault indeed has been accused of reformism...

...This is a control that no single person or political elite or ruling party or class can establish and sustain from a single point: hence Foucault's "innumerable points" and his endless networks in which, he says, we are all enmeshed...

...Thus in his book on prisons: "Although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery both immense and minute...

...But this doesn't make either power or knowledge terribly attractive...

...Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed...

...There was no sovereign, no political elite, no ruling class, but a pluralism of groups and even of individuals...

...And so on: lots of people wrote that way...

...Foucault's political theory is a "tool kit" not for revolution but for local resistance...

...power is exercised from innumerable points...

...Everybody or almost everybody had a little power...

...And yet the whole point of modern political theory, since the absolutist state provided the ground on which it was constructed, has been to account for these things...

...and patients, madmen, criminals, conscripts, children, factory hands...

...Or unless, and this is much harder, one constructs a new setting and proposes new codes and categories...

...Every disciplinary act is planned and calculated...

...they are always also the elements of its articulation...

...Still, his account does appear to have conservative implications...

...Challenged from the left, he occasionally stands firm, if uneasy: "It is necessary," he told the editorial collective of a radical magazine, to make a distinction between [the] critique of reformism as a political practice and the critique of a political practice on the grounds that it might give rise to a reform...

...They denounce official arbitrariness, harassment, favoritism, and so on...

...amend them as you will...

...the state has not been legitimate for a long time...

...But we live in a different age, where economy and society alike require (and get) a far more detailed control of individual behavior...

...But I do want to notice that the guarantee exists, like Bishop Berkeley's God, and that Foucault's stress on the particularist character of power relations is not an argument for disconnection or radical autonomy...

...But these are not the forms most specific VI to his own country, and Foucault does believe in sticking close to the local exercise of power...

...The king is headless, the political world has no practical center...

...His books are full of statements that lay claim to plausibility here and now...

...The History of Sexuality, Vol...

...lecturer, audience...

...Hobbes gives us an importantly wrong account of political sovereignty...

...they are always in a position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power...

...sovereignty works only when there is a physical sovereign...

...which consists in saying, 'Everyone has their own Gulag, the Gulag is here at our door, in our cities, our hospitals, our prisons, it's here in our heads.'" And he goes on, forcefully, to reject the "universalizing dissolution of the [Gulag] problem into the denunciation of every possible form of internment...

...But Foucault's infantile leftism is not my main concern...

...to apply to different levels of power...

...Power is not built up out of 'wills' (individual or collective), nor is it derivable from interests...

...rhetorically inflated and drained of moral distinctions, it nevertheless captures something of the reality of the modern state...

...Reading Borges's Chinese encyclopedia I would sit struggling to design a proper index...

...They are not only its inert or consenting targets...

...and the interests imposed the shape, dominating if they did not absolutely control the making of law and policy...

...It is precisely the idea of society as a system, a set of institutions, that must give way to something else—what else, we can't imagine...

...On Foucault's understanding, as I understand it, the old regime required only a rather loose discipline at the micro-level...

...Ultimately, it is only state power that can stop them...

...For neither Hobbes nor Foucault does the constitution or the law or even the actual workings of the political system make any difference...

...Foucault's more recent work is an effort to explain these forms, to work out what can be called a political epistemology...