Review of Clare O’Farrell's Michel Foucault

1970 Appointed Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious research institution of the Collège de France in Paris where he gives a course of public lectures and seminars almost every year until his death. Roland Barthes publishes S/Z, which develops and applies methods of linguistic structuralism to literature. In December Foucault launches his inaugural series of lectures titled “The Will to Knowledge.”

CULTURE Foucault describes culture as ‘a hierarchical organisation of values, accessible to everybody, but at the same time the occasion of a mechanism of selection and exclusion’ (HER: 173). For general statements about culture and cultural analysis, see 23; 34; 46; 50; 83; 89; 285; HER 3 Feb (a) 1982. On the orders underlying culture, see OT preface.

Barker (1998); Bernauer (1990); Danaher et al. (2000); Dreyfus & Rabinow (1982); Fillingham & Siüsser (1993); Horrocks & Jevtic (1997); Kendall & Wickham (1999); McHoul & Grace (1993); McNay (1994); Mills (2003); O'Farrell (1989); Rajchman (1985); Sheridan (1981); Smart (1985).

You see, given the period in which I wrote those books, it was good form (in order to be viewed favourably by the institutional Left) to cite Marx in the footnotes. So I was careful to steer clear of that. But I could dredge up— which is of no interest— quite a few passages I wrote referring to Marx. Marx would not have been that author, functioning that way in French culture, with such a political surcharge. That is the Marx I would have cited at the bottom of the page. I didn’t do it: to have some fun, and to set a trap for those among the Marxists who have tacked me to those sentences. That was part of the game.

Foucault's frequent changes of subject matter, and technical vocabulary, not to mention declarations of this kind, obscured the fact that he remained consistently interested in the same structural problems: namely how human beings seek to impose order on the world via their social structures and knowledge, the points at which these orders break down and how they change with the passage of time. He was also fascinated by the fact that there is always something that escapes our every attempt to immutably fix any order.

In 1967, he describes the task of the philosopher and by extension his own, as being to analyze the present ‘cultural conjuncture’. ‘Culture being understood here’, he says, ‘in the widest sense, not only of the production of works of art, but also of political institutions, forms of social life, prohibitions and diverse constraints’ (1967c: 582. Cf. HER: 173). Thus culture, in this sense, could be defined as the way a society constructs and organizes knowledge about the world and social relations and defines particular behaviors and knowledges as either acceptable or unacceptable. Culture can be seen in the most mundane practices and material objects as well as in the products of high art and high culture. The experience of ‘culture’, of something that could be called the study of culture(s), lies at the very heart of Foucault's own work. It is a body of writing thoroughly permeated with the recognition of the strangeness, the non-naturalness of human cultural expression in all its forms. And it is this same general recognition — that nothing produced or perceived by humans at any level — conceptual, social or material — is ‘natural’ or self-evident; everything is fodder for analysis — that also underpins cultural studies as a discipline.

In my personal life, it happened that after the awakening of my sexuality, I felt excluded, not really rejected, but belonging to the shadows of society. All the same, it is a distressing problem when you discover it for yourself. Very quickly, it was transformed into a kind of psychiatric threat: if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, you are sick. Elle ne se limite pas à ces années de stage. Dans ma vie personnelle, il se trouve que je me suis senti, dès l'éveil de ma sexualité, exclu, pas vraiment rejeté, mais appartenant à la part d'ombre de la société. C'est tout de même un problème impressionnant quand on le découvre pour soi-même. Très vite, ça s'est transformé en une espèce de menace psychiatrique : si tu n'es pas comme tout le monde, c'est que tu es anormal, si tu es anormal, c'est que tu es malade. Ces trois catégories : n'être pas comme tout le monde, n'être pas normal et être malade, sont tout de même très différentes et se sont trouvées assimilées les unes aux autres. Mais je n'ai pas envie de faire mon auto-biographie. Ce n'est pas intéressant.

The theme of Foucault as a scandalous homosexual with a penchant for whips, chains, and leather continues to be perpetuated in such texts as Horrocks and Jevtic's Foucault for Beginners (1997), on the principle perhaps that the only way to interest contemporary students in the intellectual content of his work is through a liberal smattering of sex and scandal, four-letter words, and racy cartoons.

Foucault argues that during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, madness formed a kind of general conduit for what he terms the ‘tragic experience’ (MC: 31) - namely an awareness of death, truth, other realms and the general fragility of ordinary everyday life. People who were mad were as a consequence granted a kind of grudging respect. However, this was to change in the seventeenth century with what Foucault terms the ‘Great Confinement’, a movement across Europe which saw the establishment of institutions which locked up people who were deemed to be ‘unreasonable’. This not only included mad people, but the unemployed, single mothers, defrocked priests, failed suicides, heretics, prostitutes, debauchees — in short anyone who was deemed to be socially unproductive or disruptive.

Foucault nominates 1656, the date of the decree which founded the Hôpital Général in Paris, as a symbolic landmark date to indicate this general movement of confinement. He then traces the gradual separation of mad people from other ‘unreasonable’ populations and the final emergence of madness as an object of science towards the end of the eighteenth century. By this stage, madness is no longer a voice reminding all people of the frailty of human existence, but is the silent object of medical science shut away and invisible in institutions. No longer madness, but mental illness. In Foucault's account, if the avowed aim of psychiatrists and others was to render the treatment of mad people more humane, in removing the physical chains, they merely substituted the far more insidious chains of science and moral training.

Foucault commented, on several occasions throughout his career, on how disappointed he was by the initial reception of this work, although one might argue that the lack of critical quantity was more than made up for by the critical quality. Literary critics Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, historians Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariés and philosophers of science Georges Canguilhem and Michel Serres all viewed the book with favour. But after a slow start, by the end of the 1960s, sales of the book had increased dramatically. This can be attributed to a number of factors: Foucault's best-selling status with The Order of Things in 1966; his reputation as one of the leaders of the trendy new ‘structuralist' movement; and the success of the anti-psychiatry movement, as well as a general growth of interest in marginal groups and experiences. The book was also met with outrage by traditional psychiatrists, with an entire conference being convened in 1969 to denounce its pernicious effects. Foucault put this anger down to the unwillingness of certain ‘soft’ sciences to face their less than glorious pasts. Madness and Civilization has now become a standard (if still controversial) text in the history of psychiatry, and the notion of the ‘Great Confinement’ has found wide application in a number of historical treatments dealing with the seventeenth century.

By the time Foucault published his next major work The Order of Things (OT), the structuralist movement was in full swing and this work was hailed by the media as a major contribution to the new movement. Although a bestseller on its publication, The Order of Things is probably one of Foucault's most difficult works, and it is doubtful that many of those who purchased it actually read beyond the first chapter. Indeed, there were numerous remarks to this effect at the time. A copy of The Order of Things on one's coffee table was de rigueur in certain circles and the book discreetly tucked under one's arm had certain advantages in picking up members of the opposite (or the same) sex. As well-known historian Michel de Certeau suggested facetiously in 1967, useful additions could be made to the array of literary buttons or badges worn by trendy people about town in Paris. Badges could include, for example, ‘I am mad about Foucault’ (‘je suis fou de Foucault’) and also, ‘I've actually read The Order of Things’ (Certeau, 1967: 344). The truth is that not much has changed - except perhaps that these slogans would now probably appear on tee-shirts rather than on buttons and would also be more likely to appear in English.

In more specific terms, Foucault focuses on the historical transformations affecting three areas of knowledge which up until the end of the eighteenth century were described as general grammar, the analysis of wealth, and natural history. In the nineteenth century, these areas were systematized according to the conceptual apparatus of ‘science’ and became philology, political economy, and biology. These very diverse areas were organized in very similar ways at the same points in history, and also underwent major reorganizations at roughly the same points in history. Foucault argues that until the end of the sixteenth century in Europe, it was the notion of resemblance that structured knowledge. So, in medicine for instance, if a plant (such as aconite) looked like an eye then this was a sign that it was good for diseases of the eye, just as walnuts which looked like brains were good for head wounds and the brain (OT: 27). All of nature was one huge book which could be read and interpreted by those who knew how to decipher the signs and marks God had left in nature. The scriptures and the books left by Antiquity were on an equal footing with the Book of Nature (OT: 33-4). This structure of knowledge which required people to seek out signs and resemblances and then to interpret them was replaced by a different system in the seventeenth century which ordered things into tables and compared and measured them against each other. Identity and difference, rather than resemblance, became the way of relating different objects to each other.

Foucault was not to publish his next book until 1975, but in the meantime he continued to write articles, give interviews, and deliver his annual series of lectures at the Collège de France, as well as conduct militant activity in support of a variety of socially marginalized groups. His next major work, Discipline and Punish (DP), draws indirectly on his experience in this domain and famously opens with a lurid account of the torture and execution of the regicide Damiens in 1757. This is followed by a far more sedate description of a prison timetable in 1838. Foucault's point is that in the intervening period, spectacular corporal punishment disappeared to be replaced by new forms of punishment in the shape of imprisonment and the deprivation of liberty. Traditionally, historians have argued that this change occurred because people and society had become more humane and ‘civilized’. Foucault rejects this kind of explanation and suggests instead that the old methods of punishment had simply become inefficient. Too many wrong-doers were escaping the arm of the law and public executions were no longer acting as a salutary warning to the rest of the populace. Instead, public executions were actually inciting people to crime and public disorder, providing the occasion for riots, and all sorts of other minor crimes such as pick-pocketing.

Foucault argues that prison was chosen as the preferred method of punishment in Western Europe, not because it was the most effective means of punishment, but rather because it fitted in best with the emergence of what he describes as a ‘disciplinary society’. By this, he means a certain way of acting upon and training the body and behaviour so that the individuals who make up populations could be easily controlled. This training was enforced and practiced through a number of institutions, many of which appeared at the same time as the prison - namely schools, military training institutions, factories, hospitals and so on. The smooth functioning and enforcement of this ‘disciplinary society’ was guaranteed by a system of social surveillance. Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, to serve as a metaphor for the way this system of surveillance operated and continues to operate within the social body.

Perhaps the earliest term Foucault uses to characterize the cultural ‘table top’ is the historical a priori. The a priori is a notion usually associated with the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. What Kant means by this is that there are eternal ‘ideal types’ or templates of order which exist outside of time. Hence the idea of beauty, for example, is eternal and all works of art in some way refer back to that unchanging ideal. Foucault brings this philosophical ideal of order firmly into history. In his model, there are no ideal eternal orders existing outside of time which structure our existence and thought - these orders are all located in time. It is only possible to discover patterns once they have already occurred, and it is not possible to apply the orders discovered to future events. Foucault offers a definition in The Order of Things, where he explains:

This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true.

It is ‘a fundamental arrangement of knowledge’ (OT: 157). What he means by this is that each historical period orders knowledge and constructs concepts according to certain rules. These rules can be deduced from a study of the traces of past knowledge and practices. It is far easier to see these in hindsight than deduce the rules that underlie our current practices. Foucault also uses the terms ‘the unconscious of knowledge’, the ‘archive’, and ‘implicit knowledge’ and ‘conditions of possibility’ to refer to the same ideas.

Foucault was not to publish his next book until 1975, but in the meantime he continued to write articles, give interviews, and deliver his annual series of lectures at the Collège de France, as well as conduct militant activity in support of a variety of socially marginalized groups. His next major work, Discipline and Punish (DP), draws indirectly on his experience in this domain and famously opens with a lurid account of the torture and execution of the regicide Damiens in 1757. This is followed by a far more sedate description of a prison timetable in 1838. Foucault's point is that in the intervening period, spectacular corporal punishment disappeared to be replaced by new forms of punishment in the shape of imprisonment and the deprivation of liberty. Traditionally, historians have argued that this change occurred because people and society had become more humane and ‘civilized’. Foucault rejects this kind of explanation and suggests instead that the old methods of punishment had simply become inefficient. Too many wrong-doers were escaping the arm of the law and public executions were no longer acting as a salutary warning to the rest of the populace. Instead, public executions were actually inciting people to crime and public disorder, providing the occasion for riots, and all sorts of other minor crimes such as pick-pocketing.

Foucault argues that prison was chosen as the preferred method of punishment in Western Europe, not because it was the most effective means of punishment, but rather because it fitted in best with the emergence of what he describes as a ‘disciplinary society’. By this, he means a certain way of acting upon and training the body and behaviour so that the individuals who make up populations could be easily controlled. This training was enforced and practiced through a number of institutions, many of which appeared at the same time as the prison - namely schools, military training institutions, factories, hospitals and so on. The smooth functioning and enforcement of this ‘disciplinary society’ was guaranteed by a system of social surveillance. Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, to serve as a metaphor for the way this system of surveillance operated and continues to operate within the social body.

Perhaps the earliest term Foucault uses to characterize the cultural ‘table top’ is the historical a priori. The a priori is a notion usually associated with the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. What Kant means by this is that there are eternal ‘ideal types’ or templates of order which exist outside of time. Hence the idea of beauty, for example, is eternal and all works of art in some way refer back to that unchanging ideal. Foucault brings this philosophical ideal of order firmly into history. In his model, there are no ideal eternal orders existing outside of time which structure our existence and thought - these orders are all located in time. It is only possible to discover patterns once they have already occurred, and it is not possible to apply the orders discovered to future events. Foucault offers a definition in The Order of Things, where he explains:

This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true.

It is ‘a fundamental arrangement of knowledge’ (OT: 157). What he means by this is that each historical period orders knowledge and constructs concepts according to certain rules. These rules can be deduced from a study of the traces of past knowledge and practices. It is far easier to see these in hindsight than deduce the rules that underlie our current practices. Foucault also uses the terms ‘the unconscious of knowledge’, the ‘archive’, and ‘implicit knowledge’ and ‘conditions of possibility’ to refer to the same ideas.

During the 1960s Foucault used the term “archaeology” to describe his approach to the history of knowledge. The term appears briefly in Mental Illness and Psychology and in Madness and Civilisation, and his books The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things both include the word “archaeology” in their subtitles. But it was not until 1966 that he began to offer sustained definitions. He explains that he originally borrowed the term from Kant to describe a historical practice of philosophy (1971: 60) and that he liked the word because he could play with its meanings. He adds that in Greek, arche means “beginning” and that it also resonates with the word “archive,” meaning the traces left behind by cultures in history. To extrapolate further from Foucault’s ideas, the word also allows us to think of our present as the top layer of a kind of archaeological dig: one digs down through history to understand the present, to understand what we are today. As Foucault puts it: “In a way we are nothing other than what has been said, centuries ago, months, weeks ago” (1978: 469). In short, to employ a term he uses later in his career, archaeology is always very much aimed at producing a “history of the present.”

In short, archaeology is about the “conditions of possibility” that give rise to knowledge, whereas genealogy is about the “constraints” that limit the orders of knowledge. In both instances Foucault is addressing the same level of analysis; he has simply changed his emphasis and his way of viewing it.

Foucault argues that continuity is based on a number of assumptions which he sees it as his duty to challenge:

(1) First of all, in traditional history, notions such as tradition, cause, effect and influence are all used as magical formulas to explain change. When major contradictions really can’t be smoothed over in such a fashion, then concepts such as ‘social conditions’, ‘mentality’, ‘world view’, ‘spirit of the age’ and ‘crisis’ will all be wheeled out.

(2) The second assumption is that there is a constant human nature, an essence of ‘man’ that remains the same throughout history. In this model, the way humans experience the world is basically unchanging, the only difference being that people discover more and more ‘truth’ as history progresses.

(3) Further, continuity presupposes that certain ‘objects’ and ‘categories’ or classifications remain the same, unchanged throughout history, that they have their own eternal metaphysical essences. So, for example, there has always been something called ‘mental illness’ just waiting to be ‘discovered’ by science, to be rescued from the ignorance and superstition which classified it as an untreatable madness or ‘demonic possession’. Likewise, disease was merely waiting for proper scientists to empirically observe what was actually going on in reality, to take over from the dubious quacks who insisted on applying superstitious remedies out of old books.

(4) Continuity also assumes that there is a particular end or goal to history, that all events and all change are tending towards an absolute point — this might be the classless society of Marx, or the absolute rationality of Hegel (‘the real is rational’), the progress of scientific truth or biological perfection as the result of evolution.

(5) Another feature of the continuist view is that history has progressed inevitably to the present, in a marvellous conquest of Reason and scientific truth over error and superstition. A succession of ‘great men’ and geniuses have fostered this advancement. The past merely exists as an imperfect and somewhat embarrassingly quaint prologue to the present.

(6) Finally, continuity also eliminates the possibility of chance events. Nothing ever happens without a reason. The rationality of progress, ideology, scientific truth or the working out of some political or religious destiny mean that history is determined in advance, and there is nothing anybody can do to alter the final outcomes: any changes made simply confirm the inevitable end result.

In short, for Foucault, the idea of continuity is one of the most important pillars propping up the existing status quo with all its injustices. It also makes the world a very boring and homogenous place and fosters a tendency to turn to the past to justify certain quite intolerable behaviours in the name of ‘tradition’. History, Foucault argues, is not the result of intention, destiny and design, but the result of human error, illusion, accidents and struggles for power (1971a: 380–1) and many current social arrangements should be viewed in this light.

‘Discourse’ itself was originally a technical term in linguistics and rhetoric, meaning a reasoned argument, but in some usages it has now come to mean something equivalent to ‘world view’. Foucault readily admits in The Archaeology of Knowledge that his own use of the term was somewhat equivocal and that he had used and abused it in a multitude of ways (AK: 107). In the most general sense, he uses it to mean ‘a certain “way of speaking"’ (AK: 193). He also uses it to define ‘the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation [of knowledge]’, for example ‘clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse’ (AK: 107–8).

Truth plays a major role in the way Foucault structures his writings. It could even be argued that his entire work is one long effort to reinstate a form of truth that has been consistently marginalised since Descartes - a form of truth that relies on history, on patient and constant work and ‘exercise’ by every individual in their daily lives in the world. It is a form of truth that is accessible to, and is indeed revealed by, the most marginalised of individuals - mad people, ill people, prisoners, those designated as ‘abnormal’. It is a truth that does not have a fixed and unchanging content and is not the province of a privileged few, but can be acquired by anyone through exercises involving choices of action within their own specific historical, social and cultural settings.

Foucault points out in The Order of Things that the assumption made by traditional history of ideas was that non-scientific or pre-scientific knowledge was not organised but simply provided “evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness” (OT: ix). Foucault wanted to demonstrate that it was not a question of past ignorance, and the non-scientific and superstitious versus the triumphal march of Reason and progress embodied in such noble and rigorous sciences as mathematics and physics. Science is only a particular configuration of knowledge amongst others. For example, he argues that “archaeological territories” can include literary and philosophical texts, institutional regulations and political decisions, police regulations, legal as well as scientific texts (AK: 183–4). Science emerges from this archaeological background as a particular way of ordering propositions but it does not supersede all other knowledge practices.

All forms of knowledge do not need to be ‘scientific’ in order to be valid, and the methods and procedures of science, although suitable for some bodies of knowledge, are not universally applicable. Scientific knowledge is not inherently superior or more true than other forms of knowledge. A ‘scientific practice’ in Foucault's account is a particular set of codified relations between a precisely constructed knower and a precisely constructed object, with strict rules that govern the formation of concepts. Foucault is interested in the historical emergence of this particular form of knowledge while criticising the view expressed by traditional histories of science that science signals the discovery of truth. Scientific disciplines do not mark the emergence of a pure disembodied truth conquering the errors of myth, superstition and political intrigue.

The most important feature of Foucault's theories on power is that for him power is not a ‘thing’ or a ‘capacity’ which can be owned either by State, social class or particular individuals. Instead it is a relation between different individuals and groups and only exists when it is being exercised. According to this scenario a king is only a king if he has subjects. Thus, the term power refers to sets of relations that exist between individuals, or that are strategically deployed by groups of individuals. Institutions and governments are simply the ossification of highly complex sets of power relations which exist at every level of the social body. How Foucault characterises the operations and limits of these exercises of power varies considerably. He initially put forward the hypothesis that power was co-extensive with the social body (HS). There were no pockets of freedom which escaped power relations, but instead resistance existed wherever power was exercised (1977ze: 142). This resistance was everywhere and at every level, right down, as Foucault says, to the child who picked his nose at the table in order to annoy his parents (1977zc: 407). Although Foucault insisted on several occasions that resistance was not doomed to inevitable failure in the face of the omnipresence of power, numbers of his readers still found it difficult to understand how such resistance could not be compromised, since in effect it could only ever be the mirror of the power being exercised. Foucault tried to get around this problem by briefly proposing something he called the ‘plebs’, which was a certain ‘something’ which existed in individuals and groups that escaped relations of power and which limited the exercise of power (1977ze: 137–8). He also toyed briefly with the notion of ‘counter-conduct’ which existed in opposition to the forms of conduct which were imposed by the exercise of pastoral and subsequently governmental power (STP: 195–232). [2]

Power becomes a way of changing people's conduct, or as he defines it, ‘a mode of action upon the actions of others’ (1982b: 341).

Power is not a substance. Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into. Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals. Such relations are specific, that is, they have nothing to do with exchange, production, communication, even though they combine with them. The characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct—but never exhaustively or coercively. A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him, not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then he has been caused to behave in a certain way. His freedom has been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. If an individual can remain free, however little his freedom may be, power can subject him to government. There is no power without potential refusal or revolt.

A second way in which Foucault distinguishes his ideas on power is by criticising models which see power as being purely located in the State or the administrative and executive bodies which govern the nation State. The very existence of the State in fact depends on the operation of thousands of complex micro-relations of power at every level of the social body. Foucault offers the example of military service which can only be enforced because every individual is tied in to a whole network of relations which include family, employers, teachers and other agents of social education. The grand strategies of State rely on the co-operation of a whole network of local and individualised tactics of power in which everybody is involved. Foucault (1977zc: 406-7) observes that if the police certainly have their methods (‘we know what those are’ he adds ironically) so do fathers in relation to their children, men in relation to women, children in relation to parents, women in relation to men and so on. All these relations of power at different levels work together and against each other in constantly shifting combinations. The State is merely a particular, and ultimately precarious, configuration of these multiple power relations. It is not a ‘thing’ or a universal essence (NBP: 5, 79).

In Foucault's account, disciplinary power first began to develop in earnest at the end of the eighteenth century and onwards. It both replaced and worked in tandem with an older form of power which Foucault designates (‘without really being delighted with the word’ (PP: 44)) as ‘sovereign power’. In this system, which operated in feudal societies, there are highly individualised authority figures such as the king, the priest and the father who are designated as the holders of power and to whom allegiance is owed. It is a power which operates via divine right, public ceremony and by making examples of those who transgress authority. Sovereign power operates as a ‘macrophysics’ in opposition to the ‘microphysics’ of disciplinary power which seeks to individualise every element of the social body even the most lowly (PP: 28). Foucault argues that forms of sovereign power began to become less and less efficient as a way of regulating the behaviour of populations in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century leading to the development of new techniques of social control.

Discipline, Foucault says, is a ‘technology’ aimed at: ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’ (1981h: 191). Disciplinary techniques were first developed in the army and the school, and then were very quickly applied to hospitals, factories and prisons. If the ‘disciplinary society’ started to emerge in full force in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it didn't come out of nowhere. Isolated disciplinary techniques already existed in Ancient and Medieval times and Foucault cites the Roman legions and monasteries as being cases in point (1978k: 515). He also draws attention to a major transformation which took place in the army at the end of the seventeenth century with the introduction of the rifle, which meant that soldiers had to be trained how to use them. As a result it was no longer simply enough to be strong, soldiers had to be taught how to co-ordinate their movements as a group and to respond instantly on command (1978k: 514-15; 1981h: 191). Foucault describes these new mass forms of training bodies, gestures and behaviours as a ‘political anatomy’ aimed at producing ‘docile bodies’ whose economic and social usefulness could be maximised (DP: 138).

Foucault lists a number of techniques or principles which facilitated the operation of these mechanisms of power. First of all, space was organised in a particular way, starting with a principle of ‘enclosure’ which meant that people were locked away into institutional spaces: criminals into prisons, children into schools and workers into factories. Within these broad ‘enclosures’, smaller partitions, such as cells and classrooms, dormitories and hospital wards were created. People in these enclosures were also ‘ranked’, thus children were divided into ‘classes’ according to their age and soldiers according to a chain of command. All of these divisions required specially designed architecture to physically maintain these organised social spaces.

The second set of disciplinary techniques Foucault describes relates to the organisation of activity. Firstly, the development of timetables meant that groups of people could all be engaged in the same task at the same time in schools, factories and workshops. Secondly, forms of group activity were organised: people were trained to perform the same set of movements at the same time, for instance army drills or marching, or reciting lessons together. Thirdly, methods of training the body and its gestures were perfected. In schools children were taught to hold a pen correctly and to sit at their school desks in a particular way. All of this was aimed at making the body a much more efficient unit which would waste minimal time in performing useful activities. The success of disciplinary power, Foucault argues, was guaranteed by additional technologies of generalised surveillance.

Surveillance in modern societies is guaranteed via a mechanism Foucault describes as ‘panopticism’. The Panopticon was a prison designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 1790s. It was based on the architectural principle of a ring shaped building with cells grouped around a central tower. An observer in the tower could see into each of the cells, but because of a system of louvres, the occupants of the cells could not see into the central tower. This meant that people in the cells, whether they were mad, prisoners, workers or school children eventually modified their behaviour to act as though they were being watched all the time. The idea was widely adopted at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a highly efficient model of social regulation and control. Foucault (1977h: 154 mod.) elaborates: ‘There is no need for weapons, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each person feeling its weight will end up by interiorising to the point of observing himself; thus each person will exercise this surveillance over and against himself’. It is about preventing people from doing wrong and indeed taking away their very will to do wrong. This is the principle on which modern society operates according to Foucault, and a host of other researchers have enthusiastically taken him at his word finding panoptic mechanisms at work in schools, hospitals, prisons, shopping malls, airports and indeed in almost any other contemporary public or institutional space.

Up until the end of the eighteenth century, crimes were regarded as offences against the king who would take his revenge by making examples of selected offenders. At the end of the eighteenth century, any crime became a crime against the whole social body, and the criminal, as a result, became the enemy of society. This led to the idea of a ‘dangerous’ and ‘monstrous’ individual. Only someone who was ‘sick’ or who was not quite rational, or indeed human, could offend against the entire social body. The legal system began to call on a whole array of experts including psychiatrists, social workers and educators whose function it was to determine the normality or otherwise of individuals and to define their very identity in terms of their deviation from the ‘norm’. A society which punished infractions against the law was replaced by a society which sought to cure and rehabilitate ‘diseased’ and ‘abnormal’ individuals. As Foucault puts it ‘we thus enter the age of what I would call social orthopedics. I’m talking about a form of power, a type of society that I term ‘disciplinary society’, in contrast to the penal societies known hitherto. This is the age of social control’ (1974i: 57). In contemporary society, in Foucault's view, there is an insoluble conflict between these two models in our judiciary system: between whether to judge wrong-doing in accordance with the law, or to diagnose abnormality within the framework of a medical model.

One particularly effective technique in the exercise of disciplinary power is the examination (at school, at work, in hospitals and asylums). Foucault argues that the examination is able to combine both surveillance and normalisation and turn people simultaneously into objects of knowledge and power. Through the examination, individuals are required to reproduce certain types of knowledge and behaviour. Their performance can then be measured, and entered into a data bank which compares them with others. The examination allows people to be ‘individualised’, to become ‘cases’ which are measured against other cases and are then filed and used by the social sciences (psychology, sociology, psychiatry) to generate further knowledge. All this data can be generalised and statistical ‘norms’ can be established with the resultant knowledge being used to tighten control over both populations and individuals. ‘Solutions’ can then be found to the ways in which particular individuals or classes of individuals deviate from the established norms.

But if ‘discipline’ was the major configuration of power in Foucault's work from 1973-75, Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality marked a shift in his ideas. Discipline becomes merely a ‘pole’ (HS: 139) or ‘a family’ (1981h: 193) in a whole range of technologies of power that arose in the modern age. If discipline was developed first historically, techniques of managing the life and death of populations were not far behind. Populations in this instance are not just large groups of people but are collections of living organisms with birth and death rates, different demographics and various states of health. Foucault describes the technologies used to manage populations as ‘biopolitics’ or 'biopower'.

If the focus of disciplinary power was the creation and control of the individual via methods of training the body and behaviour, the focus of bio-power was the life, death and health of entire populations. Thus forms of knowledge and practices relating to hygiene, public health, the control of reproduction and sexuality became the subject of administrative interest, with very detailed forms of knowledge being put in place to gather knowledge and manage populations. Sexuality was a key factor in this process and became the means by which populations could be disciplined medically, morally and also the means by which, of course, the population could be reproduced. Various structures to ensure the healthy and disciplined reproduction of that population had to be introduced to this end. Sexuality allowed access to both the life of the body and of the species and was, Foucault argued, ‘employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for regulations’ (HS: 146). Thus, in Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, and also his lectures Society Must be Defended, discipline becomes merely a subset of ‘biopower’. The other side of the coin of this control over the life of populations was the control over their death and Foucault argues that never before in history had such bloody wars or such systematic practices of genocide occurred as under the regimes which adopted a strategy of ‘biopolitics’.

Aagain, like discipline, biopower only occupied a primary position in Foucault's work for a short period. In hi8 1978 lectures at the Collége de France, he declared that he had been wrong about the disciplinary society, hastening to add however, ‘but I am never completely wrong, of course’ (STP: 50). The new idea he proposed was ‘governmentality’ which he says, instead of restricting freedoms as did discipline, allowed for the incorporation of these freedoms into the mechanisms which guide people's behayiour in the social body. He also notes that in his analysis of the problem of population and biopower he kept on coming back to the notion of government. In the sixteenth century, there were a whole series of problems centred around ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor’ (1978v: 202). By ‘government’, Foucault means the techniques and procedures which govern and guide people's conduct. He offers the examples of the ‘government of children, government of souls and consciences, government of a household, of a state, or of oneself’ (1980m: 81). When he first introduced the term however, his focus was exclusively on government in the restricted sense of the ‘exercise of political sovereignty’ (NBP: 3). He explains in his original definition that by the word ‘governmentality’ he means three things: firstly, the institutions and knowledge which manage the population; secondly the pre-eminence of certain exercises of power based on administrative practices of governance; and thirdly, the process by which a State, based on a system of law in the Middle Ages in Europe, was replaced by a way of administering a population (1978v: 219-20). In short, 'governmentality’ is the rationalisation and systematisation of a particular way of exercising political sovereignty through the government of people's conduct. The idea of governing a population, rather than simply ruling over a territory, Foucault says, is something that only started to appear in Europe in the sixteenth century, adapting aspects of the pastoral forms of governance aimed at saving people's souls which already existed in the Church (STP: 130-4).

Foucault is frequently criticised for attacking a variety of social practices and institutions without proposing anything in their place. As he says: ‘I am not at all the sort of philosopher who conducts or wants to conduct a discourse of truth on some science or other. Wanting to lay down the law for each and every science is the project of positivism ... Now this role of referee, judge and universal witness is one I absolutely refuse to adopt’ (1976d: 64-5). Underlying all Foucault's discussions is his rejection of the idea that anything is fixed or self-evident in any domain of human culture or production, but this is coupled at the same time with a very strong commitment to the idea of social justice.

In all of his work, Foucault makes a number of assumptions about the way human beings modify both their own and other people's behaviour. This happens through a complex interplay of choice, action and constraint. Foucault assumes that people will always seek to modify the actions of others, in short to exercise power, but he also assumes that people will at the same time resist such attempts. Although there are always multiple social and historical constraints, there is always a way of modifying those constraints, namely a margin of freedom. In addition to this, people also seek to modify their own behaviour and the way they experience the world with particular goals in mind about the kind of persons they want to become, within their given social and historical setting. This is, as Foucault insists himself, an extremely optimistic philosophy. No matter how bad the situation is, there are still different options for action and change even if these are very limited in some cases. Some critics have nonetheless read Foucault's focus on the limitations, injustices and the dark side of human existence as pessimistic, but Foucault's view is that to ignore unjust practices within the social body is to tolerate them and perpetuate their existence thus condemning a whole section of the population to despair.

The subject in one form or another occupies a key position in Foucault's work. But what exactly does this term mean? It is a term that people have had considerable difficulty in pinning down. To define it at the most general level, the ‘subject’ is a philosophical category which describes an entity which is able to choose courses of action. One must also distinguish between the subject and the individual, for example Foucault (1982b: 331) notes that he is interested in a form of power that ‘transforms individuals into subjects’. Here he is using the word subject in two senses: in the sense of being controlled by others, and also in the sense of being attached to an identity through awareness and knowledge of self. As we have already mentioned on several occasions, Foucault was consistently opposed to nineteenth century and phenomenological notions of a universal and timeless subject which was at the source of how one made sense of the world, and which was the foundation of all thought and action. The problem with this conception of the subject according to Foucault and other thinkers in the 1960s, was that it fixed the status quo and attached people to specific identities that could never be changed. Later in his career Foucault admits that early on he perhaps identified the subject too closely

During the 1960s, in place of the subject, Foucault proposed anonymous structures and networks of knowledge which did not originate in individual consciousnesses. Thus, in the case of a work of literature or a scientific theory, it is not a matter of analysing the motivations, creativity and discoveries of an individual who is the originator of that work, but in looking at what structures and patterns that work shares, and also does not share, with others. As Foucault put it in 1967: ‘the formal relations that one discovers in this way were not present in anyone's mind ... contemporary criticism is abandoning the great myth of interiority’ (1967d: 287). He also provided another example in a television interview in 1971 (1974a).

In some systems of morals the emphasis is placed on obedience to a moral law with systems of penalties for non-compliance, whereas in others the emphasis is placed on the kind of relationship the individual develops with him or herself through different actions, thoughts and feelings. Foucault is far more interested in this latter kind of system and argues that our contemporary society is in fact oriented in this direction. He suggests that there are four aspects to the way an individual constitutes him or herself as the moral subject of their actions. The contents of these aspects vary according to culture and historical period.

(1) The first aspect relates to the part of the individual which acts as the focus of moral conduct. Foucault uses the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘ethical substance’ to describe this level (UP: 37, 26). This is the part of the self that needs to be worked on in order to achieve moral conduct. Foucault argues that for contemporary people in Western society, it is feelings, for early Christians it was desire, and for the Ancient Greeks it was acts (1983c: 263). So, for example, for Ancient Greeks, it was the action of not sleeping with boys that was the moral target, for the Christians it was not desiring the boy at all, even in one’s innermost secret self, and for contemporary people it is recognising one’s true feelings and having healthy desires.

(2) The second aspect concerns what makes an individual recognise their moral obligations. Foucault describes this as ‘deontology’ or the ‘mode of subjection’ (UP: 37, 27). Depending on the historical period or culture, it might be divine law revealed in a holy text such as the Bible, or it could be social customs or the harmonious order of the cosmos. It might even be the attempt to make one’s life an example to others (for the Ancient Greeks), or rationality (for post-Enlightenment atheists and agnostics).

(3) The third aspect relates to the means by which individuals transform and work on themselves. Foucault also employs the terms ‘ascetics’ and ‘ethical work’ in this instance (UP: 37, 27). A whole variety of physical and mental techniques can be employed to this end, for example, self-discipline in the areas of food such as fasting or eating only particular types of food. Other methods might include meditation techniques to control how one uses one’s mind and the sort of thoughts that enter into one’s head, intellectual techniques of writing and keeping journals, or the way one trains one’s body — to move in particular ways, to withstand extreme conditions.

(4) Finally there is the question of what sort of person an individual might want to be: pure, immortal, free, or master of the self. Here Foucault employs the Greek word ‘telos’ and also ‘teleology’ as a description of this level (UP: 37, 27). Thus the aim might be eternal salvation or to be somebody who is in control of themselves and not at the whim of every earthly desire.

This four-part scheme appears in the Introduction to The Use of Pleasures and also in a 1983 interview (1983c) and has been particularly popular in the secondary literature. This is how Foucault classifies ethical systems in general, but what of his own personal morality as an intellectual?

There are two tools that are helpful in undermining and exposing supposedly self-evident fixtures: curiosity and innovation. ‘I dream of a new age of curiosity’ (19801: 325) he says, defining curiosity as an acute interest in and concern for everything that exists, an eagerness to look at one's familiar surroundings and find them strange, a disregard for traditional divisions between what is regarded as important knowledge and what is regarded as trivial knowledge. ‘Innovation’ follows on naturally from curiosity. By this, Foucault means continually seeking out new things to think about and imagine, and never being satisfied with one’s acquired knowledge and world views. Of crucial importance in the formulation of these three principles is Foucault's rejection of all forms of social injustice, and of what he terms a crystallisation or freezing of power relations ‘to the profit of some and the detriment of others’ (1988e: 11). Foucault's extensive militant activity in support of various oppressed and marginal groups after 1970 also attests to his intense concern for social justice. The intensity of his outrage at various forms of social injustice is evident not only in his choice of subject matter, but also in his shorter political writings on issues such as the abolition of the death penalty, the treatment of prisoners, and on political and legal oppression both in France and in other countries. There is also a certain tone which permeates much of his work, drawing very direct attention to the injustices perpetuated against certain groups, both in the past and today.

Foucault, proposes an ethics which is not based on adherence to the law or recognition of authority, such as the authority of the Church, a political party or the State (1978t: 262). Instead he suggests that it is the responsibility of each individual to reflect upon and choose how they wish to exist in the historically and culturally specific situation they find themselves in. Indeed, one might argue that Foucault's work both contributes to and participates in a general cultural shift in the wake of the 1960s from an ethics based on obedience to the law and a system of the forbidden and the permitted, to an ethics based on the division between the possible and the impossible (Ehrenberg, 1998: 15). In Foucault's view, if nothing is ever ideal in history, there is always something that can be done, even if it is not easy (1984f: 612). The possibility of redressing certain injustices always exists even if changes bring new dangers and new problems in their turn. For example, Foucault points out that the closure of mental hospitals in the wake of anti-psychiatry movement has led to new dangers, which is not to say that criticisms of these institutions should not have been made in the first place. What it means is simply that the ‘ethico-political’ work people must engage in is ongoing and never ending (1983c: 256).

By the 1980s Foucault had found a way of achieving this goal in relation to his own work, in describing his writings as ‘experiences’ which not only transformed himself as he produced them, but which were also offered as open invitations to the public to have their own experience while reading them. By ‘experience’, Foucault means a subjective event that transforms the way people relate to themselves and to each other and to their surroundings. It is something that is ‘neither true nor false’ (1980e: 243), he says, but for all that is still firmly tied to a particular cultural and historical situation (UP: 4).

If I have quoted Foucault at some length here, it is to emphasise that contrary to a common critical perception, Foucault was not operating as an amoral nihilist whose only aim was to wreak as much social havoc as possible. Foucault was not intent on reducing every order to chaos and leaving it at that, rather he was interested in showing that one cannot simply assume that certain institutions, disciplines or objects of knowledge are truths that go without saying. They are all orderly constructions that have emerged over time and one can ask questions about how those orders have been built. As he notes in The Archaeology of Knowledge he only accepts existing historical categories in order to question them, take them apart, see whether they are worth putting back together again or whether in fact new categories should be formed (AK: 26).