The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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in Cahiers pour l’analyse in summer 1968 (FDE1, 673–731). Both of these publications anticipate his sustained effort in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) to theorize the kinds of discontinuities he had analyzed in his earlier work.

In the Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, he contrasts the concern with structures and long-term continuities among social historians with the focus on discontinuities among historians of science, thought, and philosophy, describing the latter as “paying more and more attention to the play of difference” (EAK, 6). This contrast, however, is only a rhetorical introduction to Foucault’s claim that there is an epistemological mutation under way in the historical disciplines that has made discontinuity a key concept. Historians now work with many different kinds of discontinuities, such as epistemological ruptures or thresholds in the history of the sciences, points of inlection in the growth rate of a population, or the transition from one set of techniques to another in economic, medical, or scientiic practices. He counterposes this discontinuist history with earlier conceptions of history as a domain of continuous and orderly progression. On a more general and polemical level, he aligns the latter with humanist and historicist themes ultimately grounded in “the sovereignty of consciousness” (EAK, 12). Foucault’s own alignment with the philosophical revaluation of difference is clear in his diagnosis of the source of the attachment to these themes:

It is as if it was particularly dificult, in the history in which men retrace their own ideas and their own knowledge, to formulate a general theory of discontinuity, of series, of limits, unities, speciic orders and differentiated autonomies and dependences. As if, in that ield where we had become used to seeking origins, to pushing back further and further the lines of antecedents, to reconstituting traditions, to following evolutive curves, to projecting teleologies, and to having constant recourse to metaphors of life, we felt a particular repugnance to conceiving of difference, to describing separations and dispersions, to dissociating the reassuring form of the identical. (EAK, 12, emphasis added)

However, invocations of difference such as these remain largely external to the structure and content of Foucault’s analyses. To see how certain features of the philosophy of difference affect the details of his concepts of discourse, discursive formations, and the “statements” (énoncés) of which these are composed, we need to examine more closely the manner in which he deines these as systems of dispersion. Foucault begins with the observation that the unity of the discourses such as classical political economy or seventeenthand eighteenth-century natural history is that of a “dispersion of elements” (EAK, 72). His hypothesis is that the identity of a particular series of dispersed elements can be captured if he can determine “the speciic rules in accordance with which its objects, statements, concepts, and theoretical options have been formed” (ibid.). He therefore sets out to deine speciic discourses or discursive

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formations by the rules governing the formation of their objects, enunciative modalities, and concepts, as well as the discursive strategies that they make available. Along each of these axes, he inds not well-deined structures but systems of dispersion. So, for example,as far as the objects of discourse in a given ield are concerned, a discursive formation such as nineteenth-century psychiatry is deined by a group of relations between the different authorities that govern the emergence, delimitation, and speciication of its “highly dispersed” objects (EAK, 44). Similarly, the enunciative modalities of a given discursive formation are not derived from the unity of a subject of knowledge or reason in the manner of Kant but rather from the dispersion of the subject of the discourse concerned:

In the proposed analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciate modalities manifest his dispersion. To the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse. To the discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks.... Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. (EAK, 54–55)

Foucault poses the question whether, and if so how, these systems of dispersion can constitute a uniied body of discourse. His answer is that there are, in a given empirical ield at a given time, deinite relations of dependency between the rules governing each of the four dimensions of discourse. Insofar as these interrelated sets of rules tell us what must be related for a particular statement to be made, a particular concept to be used, a particular strategic option to be followed, we can speak of a system of formation for a given discourse: “To deine a system of formation in its speciic individuality is therefore to characterize a discourse or group of statements by the regularity of a practice” (EAK, 74). Conceived in this manner, discursive formations are identiiable objects that undergo constant modiication while remaining the same. They are temporal entities in the same way that a culture or a tradition exists over time in and through its constantly modulated or varied instances. Deined by sets of relations between dispersed elements, they are differential entities in the sense in which for Derrida a language is a system of différance or for Deleuze a transcendent Idea is an open-ended and evolving system of relations.

This conception of discourse and the peculiar character of discursive formations was carried over into Foucault’s programmatic remarks in his Inaugural Lecture delivered at the Collège de France in December 1970, “The Order of Discourse.” His primary objective in this lecture was to present the case that in every society there are mechanisms for the control of discourse and to identify the important ones for Western European societies: procedures of exclusion and division such as those

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between reason and madness, truth and falsehood; procedures internal to the order of discourse such as practices of commentary, the principal of authorship, membership of disciplines, discursive societies, subjection to rituals, doctrines, and the social distribution of access to certain kinds of discourse. The overall aim of these mechanisms, he suggests, is to set limits to the proliferation of discourse and the effects of chance in its production and circulation. The philosophical antipathy toward difference is not mentioned by name, but Foucault does list a number of philosophical themes that sustain and support this system of exclusions and limits: the founding subject, the idea of an originary experience, and the idea of universal mediation. These are all themes derived from the Hegelian and phenomenological traditions opposed in different ways by the philosophers of difference.

Foucault’s concern with questioning the will to truth and insistence on the density, complexity, and event-like character of discourse is not the same as Derrida’s project of drawing attention to the antifoundational role of the play of difference or Deleuze’s interest in restoring the philosophical integrity of a concept of difference in itself. However, he shares the same antagonisms toward the philosophical guarantees of consciousness and continuity. Moreover, the methodological requirements of his proposed archaeology of discourse raise theoretical problems that overlap with those raised by the philosophers of difference. First among these is the question of the nature and status of events, which are not themselves corporeal entities but are undoubtedly produced by and have effects on relations between bodies: they occur “as an effect of, and in, material dispersion” (EAK, 231). Foucault’s understanding of events closely resembles that of Deleuze, who in The Logic of Sense describes events as incorporeal entities expressed in language but attributed to conigurations of bodies in the transition from one state of affairs to another. Foucault’s conclusion might be read as a description of Deleuze’s approach, namely that “the philosophy of the event should advance in the direction, at irst sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism” (EAK, 231).

The second problem is that posed by the attempt to conceptualize discursive formations as at once discontinuous with one another and themselves while at the same time maintaining their identity. This is the problem of the status of this discontinuity that cannot be conceived on the basis of the unity of the subject or the temporal instant. Beyond these and outside existing philosophies of time and the subject, we must develop “a theory of discontinuous systematization” (une théorie des systématicités discontinues) (EAK, 231; FOD, 60). Foucault’s call is echoed by Deleuze’s suggestion that philosophy is the “logic” or theory of multiplicities (Deleuze 1995, 147; Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 148). Deleuze’s distinctive contribution to this problem of inding ways to conceive of a form of identity or unity that is not identical to itself lies in his elaboration of speciic examples of such multiplicities. Thus, in Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition, he outlines a concept of qualitative or pure multiplicities that he variously describes as Ideas, Problems, or Structures. These are

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differential structures in the sense that they are composed of purely formal elements deined by their reciprocal relations to one another. Thus, for example, Deleuze takes the Idea of society to be a system of differential relations of property and relations of production established between unspeciied “supports” of ownership and labor power. Deined in this manner, intrinsically rather than by external relations, the Idea or social structure constitutes “an internal multiplicity – in other words, a system of multiple, non-localizable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms” (Deleuze 1994, 183). Deleuze developed further examples of differential multiplicities in his major collaboration with Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). However, neither he nor Foucault ever elaborated the theory of discontinuous systems called for in

The Order of Discourse.

Foucault’s “Theatrum Philosophicum” appeared in November 1970, one month before he delivered his inaugural lecture. Judith Revel argues that this text marks an essential turn in Foucault’s thought, on the grounds that, over and above its supericial appearance as an account of Deleuze’s books, it represented his irst explicit problematization of the notion of difference (Revel 1996, 727). This problematization occurs in the form of Foucault’s uncritical endorsement of Deleuze’s account of the manner in which throughout the history of philosophy difference has been subordinated to igures of identity and sameness, and his account of what is required to overturn that subordination and to free difference: “Categories dictate the play of afirmations and negations, establish the legitimacy of resemblances within representation, and guarantee the objectivity and operation of concepts. They suppress anarchic difference, divide differences into zones, delimit their rights, and prescribe their task of speciication with respect to individual beings. On the one side, they can be understood as the a priori forms of knowledge, but on the other, they appear as an archaic morality, the ancient decalogue that the identical imposed upon difference. Difference can only be liberated through the invention of an a-categorical thought” (EEW2, 359).

Foucault’s archaeological studies seemed to chart the forms of this dominant image of thought insofar as they sought to identify the system of categories and concepts that enable the distribution of differences and similarities within a given group of empirical ields: “In each case, it is always a matter of reconstituting the manner in which a space is established so that difference can be recuperated within the identitarian regime of the other, understood as the other of the same rather than as other to the same” (Revel 1996, 729, my English translation, Revel’s italics). However, Revel points out, the references to Sade, Artaud, Klossowski, Bataille, and Blanchot throughout this text remind us of Foucault’s long-held interest in other ways of thinking differently and thereby thinking difference independently of any relation to the same. In these literary texts, she suggests, we can observe Foucault’s repeated efforts to discern the outlines of a “non-categorial thought” and an understanding

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Suggested Reading

Patton, Paul. 2010. Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Revel, Judith. 1996. “Foucault lecteur de Deleuze: De l’écart à la différence,” Critique nos. 591–592 (August–September): 723–735.

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In Discipline and Punish, his well-known treatise on the birth of the prison, Foucault painstakingly describes the concept of discipline and the methods he later terms “disciplinary technology” (ECF-SMD, 242n1). In the irst two parts of the text, Foucault delineates the emergence of a new form of power – discipline – that radically differs from “sovereign power,” an older form associated with monarchs. Sovereign power is both visible and external, and the monarch invokes public spectacle to demonstrate his absolute domination. Discipline and Punish thus begins with the public execution of Damiens for regicide (murder of the king), the most egregious crime in a monarchy and a direct attack on state authority. To reassert and reinforce the sovereign’s absolute authority, Damiens was subjected to extreme torture: his lesh was torn from his breasts; he was burned with lead, oil, wax, and sulfur; he was drawn and quartered by horses; and his ashes were scattered to the winds. Under sovereign power, the sovereign’s domination is visibly and publicly exercised against the body of criminals who, like Damiens, violate the sanctity of the sovereign’s laws.

Foucault contrasts this public spectacle of power with a more modern form of power, one that operates invisibly while simultaneously making its target, the individual body, more visible. In the exercise of disciplinary power, individual bodies are subjected to a continual process of surveillance, examination, judgment, and correction. Disciplinary power employs the norm to correct behavior and transform individuals into docile bodies who are measured and ranked by their relationship to the norm (EDP, 137–138). The norm is a means of exercising domination, a “positive” standard that directs and sets the outer limits of acceptable behavior. It is not derived from natural law but comes instead from an attempt to make individual bodies both docile and socially useful. Normalization is a process involving the “positive technique of intervention and transformation” (ECF-AB, 50). It seeks to manage bodies and delimit dangerous individuals while simultaneously coercing each body into compliance with the norm and productivity. The mechanisms by which we train schoolchildren to be “good” pupils and “good” citizens illustrate how disciplinary power operates through the norm and the process of normalization. Disciplinary power, unlike sovereign power, relies heavily on rewards to induce correct behavior. And when individuals do not comply with the norm, the remedy is not simply punishment but more training and more discipline.

Although discipline is aimed at managing individual bodies, it is concerned not only with minute levels of physical and anatomical functioning; it also aims to manage attitudes and potentialities and to generate knowledge about the individual bodies on which it acts. Through that process, disciplinary power introduces an apparent paradox: it creates and reinforces a kind of individuality, even as it molds individual bodies into useful components of larger social machines, which range from the military and prisons to schools, hospitals, and factories. The individual body is thereby

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situated in a modern matrix of power, one that is concerned both with how the body operates and with what the body produces.

To further illustrate the shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power, Foucault contrasts discipline with both monastic life and slavery as alternative forms of domination. Foucault argues, for instance, that slavery relies solely on the physical appropriation of bodies through external punishment, whereas disciplinary power manages to control bodies without direct confrontation. And yet, as Foucault explains, although discipline differs from slavery because it is not based on a relation of appropriation of bodies, “the elegance of discipline” lies in the fact that it can dispense with this “costly and violent relation” while remaining no less effective (EDP, 137). One might suggest that the Atlantic slave trade combined both the appropriation of bodies and the imposition of discipline on black slaves to transform them into docile bodies that accept, rather than resist, the slaveholders’ norm. Nonetheless, Foucault’s essential point is that disciplinary power operates primarily by facilitating an individual’s acceptance of the norm and the state’s authority rather than through confrontational force and public spectacle.

In Foucault’s view, the shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power came about because sovereign power is ineficient. Under sovereign power, public acceptance of the monarch’s authority is signiied through outward behavior and language, and spectacle is the vehicle by which the sovereign seeks to obtain the desired behavior. But with disciplinary power, society is no longer satisied with the signifying elements of behavior and language alone. Instead, it seeks to maintain a constant constraint on the body, an eficient, ongoing, and ever-present coercion with political effects.

The shift from a violent external spectacle of power (as in the torture of Damiens) to the ongoing constraints of discipline might seem to be “humane,” but Foucault argues that the seemingly humane nature of disciplinary power is false. Discipline is not grounded in an appeal to humanity. Instead, it is a more intense and insidious form of power, one that produces “subjected and practiced bodies” in ways that are more coercive, even if they do not seem outwardly violent (EDP, 138).

After discussing the emergence of discipline and the differences between sovereign power and disciplinary power, Foucault devotes the remainder of Discipline and Punish to a detailed description, with examples, of the attributes and technologies of disciplinary power. His focus is on the ways that disciplinary power manages and affects individual bodies, and the technologies through which that power transforms individual bodies into components of a larger social machine. At the core of discipline is the ability to make a body both docile and useful, to subject it to power and thereby improve it. Disciplinary techniques are employed by institutions such as families, schools, prisons, the military, and the state. Society is concerned not only with the operation of the body’s physical anatomy but also with the body’s engagement in the larger political landscape, such that the body

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itself becomes a method by which society transforms the individual into a docile and productive citizen.

For Foucault, the use of disciplinary mechanisms by social institutions and modern states becomes singularly important. This focus is in keeping with his sense that the exercise of power has shifted away from a sovereign, and that power is not held like a commodity. In a monarchy, the exercise of authority is personal, and the locus of power resides in the person of the king. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is relational rather than personal: power circulates through a hierarchical structure, and it relies on the distribution and ranking of individual bodies within that structure. In the lectures course called “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault explains that disciplinary power is not divided between those who have it and those who do not, or between those who hold it and those who are subject to it. Instead, individuals who exercise disciplinary power are interchangeable. Power thus “circulates” through “networks,” and individuals are “relays” for power, which both passes through them and is applied to them (ECF-SMD, 29). As a result, power “is never localized here or there, it is never in the hands of some, and it is never appropriated in the way that wealth or a commodity can be appropriated” (ibid.).

The techniques of disciplinary power operate through meticulous control of the body and its very minute functioning. Foucault contrasts this technology with sovereign and juridical power, which operate according to the law rather than the norm. The model, he suggests, is that of turning an ordinary man into a soldier, or transforming an undisciplined child into a well-behaved pupil. These forms of control are exercised not only in this more public domain: they become central in the way society manages criminals. But even as Foucault examines the birth of the modern prison, his larger point is that disciplinary power is present anywhere there is a norm – including the norm that underlies our educational system. If we have come to see parallels between schools and prisons, it is largely because Foucault so clearly sketched them.

At the core of the disciplinary process are three distinct technologies – hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination – by which individuals are trained and transformed into docile and useful bodies. The process is grounded on the norm, which functions as a principle of coercion and correct action, a standard characterized by basic aspects of “time, activity, behavior, speech, body, attitude, and sexuality” (EDP, 178). The three technologies are employed to normalize each individual body. The irst technology, hierarchical observation, allows a person to view subjects from a position of hypervisibility through spatial designs that highlight the power relationship and enforce a visual coercion. Factory loors, military inspections, and school classrooms are all examples. From the vantage point of hierarchical observation, the examiner engages in surveillance and subjects individual bodies to a normalizing judgment that culminates with an examination. The examination is a ritualized means by which each individual is subjected to a disciplinary gaze, compared