Foucault and Power Revisited1

Nathan Widder

(Typescript of article published in the European Journal of Political Theory, 3.4 (2004))

Abstract: This paper takes issue with interpretations of Foucault’s thought that understand

power and resistance as forces working in opposition to one another to fix and dissolve or

construct and deconstruct social identities. Starting from the theme of dispersion presented in

The Archaeology of Knowledge, it maintains that, for Foucault, power works only in a

dispersive manner and that identities are not so much substantialities produced by power as

simulacra that appear on the surface of a very different dynamic. Resistance, in turn, is not a

force opposed to power but rather a consequence of the disjunctive nature of power relations

themselves. Using this reconceived dynamic of power and resistance, the paper revisits

Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary society and the micropolitics of the care of the self,

and argues that although Foucault has been deployed in political theory to show that identities

are both necessary and problematic, his work in fact points to a politics and ethics that strives

to dispense with this necessity altogether.

Keywords: Foucault, power, difference, identity, post-identity politics.

In his Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault declares that the

epistemological mutation of history will remain incomplete as long as its recent focus on

discontinuities continues to hold onto the coherence and sovereignty of the subject.2

Ironically, the political and philosophical mutations initiated by Foucault himself may remain

incomplete so long as his conceptualisation of power continues to be interpreted in ways that

retain the coherence and centrality of identity. As the influence of Foucault’s thought in the

social sciences and humanities perhaps begins to wane and as attention is turned, especially

within more specialist circles, to the work of others, it is worth enquiring into whether the full

import of Foucault’s understanding of power has in the main been properly appreciated.

In this paper, I wish to take issue with two interrelated ideas that are prevalent in a

great deal of Foucauldian literature: that power operates to fix and impose identities on its

subjects; and that resistance, which itself may be considered a form of power, works to

oppose this first power and thereby dissolve or deconstruct power’s identity formations. This

use of identity as the central term around which power and resistance are understood to

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operate has been widely accepted by Foucault’s interpreters because it seems compatible with

Foucault’s main criticisms of traditional juridico-discursive models of power: that these

models fail to appreciate the positive and productive nature of power, its differing micro and

macro levels of operation, and a certain complexity of its strategies, which go far beyond

those of law and restriction. Nevertheless, I will argue that framing Foucault’s analytic of

power in this way ultimately links it to the very will to truth that Foucault contests by making

the fixing of identity central to whatever truths and meanings are constructed by power.

Ultimately, I maintain, the dynamic of power relations that Foucault outlines is domesticated

by these interpretations and Foucault’s thought is aligned with theories and approaches he

rejects.

There are statements from Foucault that seem to encourage this understanding of

power and resistance as opposing forces that fix and unfix identities. For example, in ‘The

Subject and Power’, he proposes as a new analysis of power relations ‘taking the forms of

resistance against different forms of power as a starting point’ and maintains that these forms

of resistance ‘attack everything which…forces the individual back on himself and ties him to

his own identity in a constraining way’. 3

But this apparent opposition of power and

resistance is immediately qualified by Foucault when he says that these same resistances ‘are

in opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and

qualification…What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its

relations to power. In short, the régime du savoir’.4 What contemporary forms of resistance

oppose, therefore, are not power relations as such, but a regime of knowledge that ties the

individual in a constraining way to his or her identity. The importance of this subtle shift

from power to a power/knowledge regime becomes clear when Foucault examines the

efficacy of power relations and denies that this process of fixing is ever really power’s aim or

effect: modern society, he argues, is disciplinary – a fact that, of course, requires a regime of

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knowledge that delineates standards of normality and deviancy against which individuals are

subjected – but this hardly makes it disciplined.

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the

eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them

become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in

barracks, schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly better invigilated

process of adjustment has been sought after – more and more rational and

economic – between productive activities, resources of communication, and

the play of power relations.5

To some extent, then, it would seem that ascribing this opposition of power and

resistance to Foucault reflects as much as anything a desire of his commentators to

understand power and resistance in these terms. This perhaps explains a strong tendency in

many readings to admonish Foucault for holding incomplete or contradictory ideas when

these ideas are incomplete or contradictory only if Foucault himself has conceived of power

as moulding subjects into constituted identities and resistance as disrupting this power of

fixing. Many criticisms of Foucault’s thought, even from those who draw inspiration from it,

appear and reappear so frequently that they have become cliché. Nevertheless, their

regularity even across divergent approaches suggests that there is something, both political

and philosophical, that these diverse positions share.

Here I will simply mention three prominent kinds of reading that both ascribe to

Foucault an opposition of power and resistance and affirm such an opposition themselves

while criticizing Foucault for failing to sustain it. The first comes from normatively oriented

theories, variants of which are advanced by Habermas as well as certain feminist political

theorists, which seek to justify opposition to dominating forms of power. Power is seen to

fix, repress, and dominate, and Foucault is, in some cases, applauded for showing how forms

and identities often taken to be pregiven or natural (for example, those of the female body)

are in fact constituted by this power. Nevertheless, according to these readings, Foucault’s

thesis of an omni-present power disciplining subjects into socially constructed identities

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precludes the possibility of any resistance that could oppose power, either because it fails to

provide a space for this resistance or because it provides no foundation for a critique of power

as domination and thereby falls into relativism. Even Foucault, it is claimed, finds his

analytic inadequate and ends up reversing himself between his writings on power and his

writings on the self. Sometimes this is declared a groundless change of direction, since

Foucault, it is said, has already demolished any human essence or subjectivity that could

anchor freedom or self-creation, reducing the products of disciplinary power to socialised

‘docile bodies’. In any event, the politics of the self outlined by the later Foucault, which,

according to this reading, is meant to oppose disciplinary power, is left without any

normative justification, since normativity itself has been firmly ensconced in power.6

A second reading is given by certain post-structuralist thinkers such as Judith Butler.

It supports the view that there is no simple outside to power, but it makes space for an

opposing resistance by denying that Foucauldian power can be restricted to domination and

repression. It thereby affirms that, for Foucault, resistance is internal to power, but it still

accuses Foucault of failing to sustain this view and ultimately seeking to anchor resistance

someplace outside of power. Again, power is seen to fix social identities and thereby

constitute subjects, but it now has two opposing sides, one juridical and regulatory, which

constructs subjects, and another productive of excesses that destabilize such formations.

When Butler links her own project explicitly to Foucault, she attributes to him a view of a

power that ‘orchestrates the formation and sustenance of subjects’ and proposes ‘a return to

the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes

over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter. That matter is

always materialized has, I think, to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed,

materializing effects of regulatory power in the Foucaultian sense’.7 She also acknowledges

that for Foucault this same regulatory power produces its own instabilities,8 but she

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nevertheless maintains that Foucault’s move in this direction is only partial and that he

ultimately locates resistance not within power but in bodies and pleasures, suggesting a

prediscursive or power-free realm of desire and materiality and seeming to uphold an

emancipatory ideal that is clearly incompatible with his work as a whole.9

A third reading, given by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their recent work,

Empire, does not accuse Foucault of failing to adequately oppose power and resistance, but

rather holds his account to be incomplete and outdated, as disciplinary society has given way

to control society. Although the latter is implicit in Foucault’s work, it still represents a step

beyond disciplinary power, which is localised within specific institutions and sites and so

does not grasp fully the invidious nature of the decentralised power of the new empire. What

remains, however, is a notion of power as fixing the individuals within its grasp:

‘Disciplinarity fixed individuals within institutions,’ and, with the passage to control society,

‘the immanent exercise of discipline…is extended even more generally’.10

The importance

of the move beyond Foucault, for Hardt and Negri, is that it grasps more comprehensively

and concretely contemporary forms of domination, which must be resisted by the diverse and

nomadic multitude that is also formed by this power.11

Thus, while Foucault is here

admonished for not fully grasping the nature of (post)modern power relations, he is still seen

as contributing to an understanding of power that can inform a politics of militant opposition

and resistance.

Against these interpretations and their ascription to Foucault of an oppositional

relation of power and resistance, I propose to read Foucault’s understanding of power through

the theme of dispersion found in The Archaeology of Knowledge. This middle work is often

treated merely as representing a semi-structuralist and linguistic-centred phase that Foucault

rejected as he moved to an analysis of the institutions and practices – which archaeological

analysis had bracketed off as ‘non-discursive’ – and therefore to an analytics of power acting

6

on and through bodies.12

Nevertheless, I contend that even in this move from an archaeology

of discursive formations to a genealogy of power, and beyond that to a genealogy of ethics,

the logic of dispersion remains crucial to Foucault. On my reading, identity – both as a norm

and as a multiplicity of deviations from a norm – does play an important role in Foucault’s

thought, but it operates as a simulacrum that arises from power relations rather than as a

substantiality that relations of power and resistance constitute and demolish. The thesis I will

advance is this: power relations operate in a dispersive manner and power is nothing but the

power of dispersion; the opposition of power and resistance is a misinterpretation of this

dispersive dynamic that comes when its depth is forgotten and only its visible surface effects

– the precariously bounded unities that we designate as identities – are recognised. Identities,

in other words, are optical illusions of power relations that are interspersed with resistances,

yet these effects are often, through an error of abstraction, treated as the substances that

power and resistance form and deconstruct. This is the error Foucault locates in the

knowledge regimes of the will to truth, which demands that the objects of its gaze conform to

an idea of knowledge that is closely linked to identity and identification. Yet it is also the

error that governs many interpretations of Foucault’s thought. To move beyond the will to

truth and pave the way for an ethics of the self, it is therefore necessary to go beyond

oppositional logics. It requires understanding the unity of the self not in terms of borders

constructed to separate it from what it is not, but in terms of a special sort of disjunction.

Foucault maintains that ‘power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of

itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms’.13

Despite the

theoretical advances inspired by Foucault’s work, perhaps a dimension of power continues to

hide itself, allowing many theories that have engaged with Foucault to retain the comforts of

an idea of resistance – and political resistance in particular – as being opposed to power. The

fact that the king’s head has been severed, that power is not necessarily assigned anymore to

7

an agent of domination, seems to have done little to problematise this opposition of power

and resistance.

The reading of Foucault I will advance here is strongly indebted to the work of Gilles

Deleuze, and in particular to Deleuze’s contention, in Difference and Repetition, that ‘All

identities are only simulated, produced as an optical “effect” by the more profound game of

difference and repetition.’14

To my knowledge, Foucault never speaks of identities in terms

of simulacra, but I believe this term is nonetheless appropriate to his thought. It must be

remembered, however, that Deleuze himself reads Foucault as opposing power and resistance

in order to criticise him. According to Deleuze (in both his solo works and those with Félix

Guattari), Foucault presents a framework of resistance working in simple opposition to power

that only partially deterritorializes molar formations of identity and fails to grasp the

complexities of desire, which works not by identity and opposition but by a difference and a

becoming that exceed opposition and contradiction.15

It should be noted, however, that this

reading and critique are absent from Deleuze’s monograph on Foucault.16

Regularity of Dispersion

The Archaeology of Knowledge aims to outline the discursive formations that enable the

emergence of subjects and objects and that condition the production of knowledge domains.

To achieve this, Foucault says, ‘we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of

which, in is own way, diversifies the theme of continuity’.17

Negative unities such as

‘tradition’, ‘author’, ‘oeuvre’, ‘book’, ‘science’, and ‘literature’, not only impose themselves

from the outside onto discourse, but also erect bulky abstractions. There are few specificities

we can learn about a discourse from the fact that it is signed by one person; the book always

refers to other books, so that its ‘frontiers…are never clear-cut’;18

objects lack the

consistency and continuity over time necessary to allow a science to be defined by its

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reference to these objects, and the same can be said of the style, concepts, and themes of any

science.19

It is not that these terms have no use or value, but rather that their fuzziness and

uncertainty refer them back to a different level that constitutes their conditions of

emergence.20

Once these abstract unities are dispensed with, the dispersion of discursive

formations can appear. But what is dispersion? It is not a simple scattering of elements in an

open or empty space. Rather, it is a difference within the convergence of heterogeneous

domains. Dispersion is inseparable from a synthesis of differences, one that does not collapse

these differences into unity but rather forms the intersection where unities can appear, or at

the very least where the elements can appear that the unities of tradition, science, literature,

etc., gather together and organise. It is always a synthesis that contains within it

discontinuity.

Thus, if we ask what makes a discourse this particular discourse, we may first of all

say that it is through a not very well constructed union of elements that separates the

discourse from what it is not. But if we ask what allows the elements gathered together under

the name of this discourse to appear in the first place, we find that they always arise in the

intersections of divergent discourses. A discursive formation links together heterogeneous

discursive zones, from which emerge subjects and objects that fit neither zone completely,

with these same subjects and objects appearing in different intersections. The objects of 19th

century psychopathology, for example, emerge from within the family, the workplace, and

the religious community, while the expert subjects of this new discipline find their authority

through the convergence of medicine and law and the mapping of the clinical distinction (the

clinic itself forming through the linkage of medical and psychiatric discourses) of

health/sickness onto the legal distinction of citizen/criminal, which is then brought to bear on

the family, workplace, and religious environments.21

There are parallels here with

Althusserian overdetermination and condensation,22

but the convergence of these

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heterogeneous domains is not a causal relation, but rather one that conditions the possibility

of the appearance of subjects, objects, and knowledges. This is why discursive relations are

neither primary relations of dependence nor secondary relations that self-reflexively organise

objects.23

They are, however, inseparable from discursive practices – indeed, discourse itself

is a practice. Within a discursive formation, incompatible or contradictory objects and

concepts can co-exist, though within the actual discourses that arise from these formations,

the law of non-contradiction may apply.24

Two points must be noted. First, the heterogeneous domains such as law, family, etc.,

are themselves loose and porous unities whose subjects and objects are formed in the

interstices that link together divergent zones. Second, the unity of a discursive formation is

defined by the regularity of its dispersion – that is, the regularity of the linkages it forges –

but this regularity must be understood in a very specific way. As the heterogeneous

formations are themselves in flux, the regularity is not a static bond: ‘A discursive formation,

then, does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes it for decades or

centuries…it presents the principle of articulation between a series of discursive events and

other series of events, transformations, mutations, and processes. It is not an atemporal form,

but a schema of correspondence between several temporal series’.25

As the linkage itself is in

motion, the regularity must be seen as a consistency that arises from the continuing synthesis

of moving series. Like the pattern of bubbles and surface folds that form where two flows of

water meet, a discursive formation carries with it never fully stable shapes or images – its

subjects, its objects, etc. – that persist over time, arising from the interaction of converging

fluxes or series. Yet the principle that determines the regularity of a discourse is not to be

found in these visible stabilities. It is not found in the subjects or objects themselves, nor is it

in the stability of knowledge, as a discursive formation can persist even while its objects

mutate, new objects are found, or new knowledges are discovered or forgotten ones are

10

rediscovered. Instead, Foucault says, the coherence of the formation is found in the

regularity of statements.

A statement is neither a proposition nor a sentence and so the rules governing

statements are neither logical nor grammatical. Statements, according to Foucault, are what

allow sentences and propositions to ‘make sense’26

– sense here understood as more than a

matter of whether a proposition or sentence is ‘well-formed’, since even an incoherent

proposition or grammatically incorrect sentence may still have a sense. Statements therefore

operate according to a principle of rarity different from propositions or sentences, one

whereby no matter how many statements exist, it is still not possible to say anything at any

time and from any place.27

Statements themselves always refer to other statements, their

meaning being determined not by any external set of rules but by this relational context to

which they belong. But the relation is one whereby a statement links together heterogeneous

statements, bestowing sense on sentences, propositions, subjects, and objects by establishing

the necessary connections between divergent domains (for example, between medicine and

law, which, as already seen, is necessary for the propositions and sentences of

psychopathology to make sense). A statement always refers beyond itself to an ensemble of

other statements, but this ensemble is not in a relation of simple exteriority to the first

statement, but is rather folded into it together internally and immanently. This is why a

statement, unlike a name, cannot be repeated – it ‘exists outside any possibility of

reappearing’28

– and yet ‘there can be no statement that in one way or another does not

reactualize others’.29

It is also how a series of signs can become a statement only by virtue of

‘a specific relation that concerns itself’,30

yet ‘the referential of the statement forms the place,

the condition, the field of emergence’31

of subjects and objects, and the statement ‘cannot

operate without the existence of an associated domain’32

of other statements. The field of

statements thus forms a complex and dispersed web, which makes the analysis of statements

11

equivalent to that of a discursive formation. The study of a discursive formation, Foucault

says, is the study of its rarity, which makes it a study of both power and politics.

In this sense, discourse ceases to be what it is for the exegetic attitude: an

inexhaustible treasure from which one can always draw new, and always

unpredictable riches; a providence that has always spoken in advance, and

which enables one to hear, when one knows how to listen, retrospective

oracles: it appears as an asset – finite, limited, desirable, useful – that has its

own rules of appearance, but also its own conditions of appropriation and

operation; an asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and

not only in its ‘practical applications’), poses the question of power; an asset

that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle.33

The Archaeology does not develop a conceptualisation of power, but it does contain

the themes that will appear in Foucault’s later work. Beneath porous unities and identities is

another level – a microscopic level – consisting of a network of convergences, divergences,

and disjunctions. These identities are in fact simulacra that arise from the dynamics of

discursive series. They are no less real for being simulations, but they do not have the

substantiality often attributed to them and they do not provide the stability for the discursive

formations in which they appear. Only with the establishment of these stabilities can we

speak properly of historical and chronological passage, but the dynamic of statements and

discursive formations is not chronological: ‘in its transformations, in its successive series, in

its derivations, the field of statements does not obey the temporality of the consciousness as

its necessary model’.34

Discursive formations arise only with and through practices, which

are socially and historically specific. But practices are always accompanied by a

nonhistorical and untimely excess, which is neither a communally imposed opinion nor an

anonymous and timeless truth that discourse partially uncovers,35

but is rather an event-ness

of the statement that is irreducible to the historicity of its associated practices. A, Z, E, R, T –

the alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters – has a spatio-temporal and material

location.36

Historically, there is a time and place when it is first brought into practice and

prior conditions can be found to explain its emergence. But who could reduce its sense and

12

efficacy to this point of appearance and how could it be treated as a mere contingency that

can be changed at whim? The statement and its sense remain immanent to the discursive

formation and the practice of discourse but never localizable in them. It is this excess that

gives discourse its peculiar discontinuity, making it an event that historical analysis has

always tried to order in chronological sequence, ‘to preserve, against all decentrings, the

sovereignty of the subject’.37

Power relations too are characterised by discontinuity and

untimeliness even while they remain immanent to the practices that give rise to superficial

identities and unities. They do not cause substantive unities to come into existence, but rather

condition the appearance of identities whose borders are always blurred and uncertain.

Power relations form a microscopic field of events that makes the analysis of power neither

historical nor analytical but rather genealogical.

The will to truth

In ‘The Order of Discourse’, Foucault writes: ‘in every society the production of discourse is

at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures

whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to

evade its ponderous, formidable materiality’.38

What else is the danger of discourse but that

it always exceeds the loose unity of its objects, the shifting authority of its subjects, and the

ephemeral legitimacy of its knowledges? Foucault goes on to contend that while there exist

‘external’ restrictions on discourse, such as prohibition and rejection, another ‘internal’

limitation is becoming the most significant – the will to truth. Today this will to truth

‘increasingly attempts to assimilate the others, both in order to modify them and to provide

them with a foundation’.39

The will to truth does not so much will truth as will a certain kind of truth – or,

perhaps better, it wills that the world conform to a certain image of truth. In the first place,

13

the will effects historically contingent divisions between truth and falsity and between power

and true discourse: whereas the ancient conception labelled true discourse that which had the

power to inspire and to dominate – i.e., the discourse of the strong – from Socrates and Plato

onwards true discourse becomes that which is free from such power effects.40

This is how

the will to truth becomes an internal limitation – discourse compels itself to tell the truth

independent of any attachment to power or to a powerful speaker, but in this way it hides the

exercise of power that still flows through it, a power that follows necessarily from it being a

will to truth: ‘“True” discourse, freed from desire and power by the necessity of its form,

cannot recognize the will to truth which pervades it’.41

Second, the will to truth actually

licenses a great deal of self-deception and ignorance. The 19th

century discourses on human

sexuality, for example, are feeble in content ‘from the standpoint of elementary rationality,

not to mention scientificity’.42

They are formed by the intersection of a biological discourse

of reproduction and a medical discourse of sex, both of which employed ‘quite different rules

of formation’ and related to each other with ‘no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration’. 43

Such a disparity ‘indicate[s] that the aim of such a discourse was not to state the truth but to

prevent its very emergence’.44

The will to truth must therefore be seen as a will to mark

certain forms of discourse and knowledge with an authoritative stamp of truthfulness or

scientificity, which is quite compatible with the willing of various sorts of non-knowledge:

‘Choosing not to recognize was yet another vagary of the will to truth’.45

The modern will to truth, as Foucault’s genealogical works detail, seeks to define and

delineate various forms of deviancy and delinquency in order to better police standards of

normality and to compel individuals towards these norms against any resistances that might

oppose this movement. In other words, it aims to secure the purity of an identity deemed to

be good and healthy against identities that are defined as the opposite, as evil or sick, and in

this sense it can be said to underpin a knowledge regime that ‘ties’ individuals to their

14

identities in constraining ways. The explosion of discourse surrounding sexual acts falling

outside the norm, the more precise separations between criminal acts where responsibility can

be assigned and acts that signal psychological deficiencies, the more and more detailed

definitions and classifications of abnormalities, and the intensification of strategies of

surveillance, testing, and confession, can all be attributed to this goal.46

Nevertheless, this is

the aim of a will to truth, not a description of the dynamic of power both deployed by this

will and within which it is wrapped up. It is a mistake to confuse the strategies of the will to

truth with the efficacy of power per se, because this confusion reduces the dynamics of power

to one comprehensible to this same problematic will to truth.

If the will to truth can be traced to Plato, then its error can be seen to be more than

simply that it claims that the true discourse is free of power. Plato, in disparaging the world

of becoming, posits truth in the realm of Forms that remain constant over time. He thereby

invests truth in a positive identity and understands difference in terms of a falling away from

this identity into its opposite – hence ugliness is treated as no more than the lack of Beauty

and the realm of becoming is seen as a mixture of Being and its opposite, nothingness. In this

respect, Plato’s error is to take what is simulacral – identity – to be substantial truth, while

measuring difference in terms of degrees of opposition to this identity. At the same time,

what puts this substantiality into question by being neither substantial truth nor its opposite –

the artist, the actor, and the sophist – is denigrated as a mere simulation of the truth and of the

true discourse of the philosopher. Thus, the will to truth not only sees the truth as being free

of power, but also conceives of its world in terms of identity and opposition. It works to iron

out the discontinuity and divergence that archaeological analysis uncovers, unfolding these

into a difference understood in terms of inside and outside.

We therefore only partially uncover what the will to truth hides when we show that

there can be no prediscursive truth and no identity or essence prior to power. It is not enough

15

to say that power constructs the borders of an identity against resistances or that it produces

the very deviancies that oppose its operations. It is also not enough to say that power

produces and fixes deviancies in order to secure the place of the norm as their opposite, as

being ‘not’ these deviancies. The precarious and loose nature of both normal and deviant

identities – their failure to fully grasp and know the objects they are said to define – is not

due to a resistance acting in some sort of thermodynamic manner as an equal and opposite

reaction to power: it is not that power fixes, while resistance unhinges. This is only a

superficial description of the dynamics of power, one that is compatible with a will to truth

that can accept the constructed nature of its world as long as the world is still constructed in

terms of identity and opposition.47

Although Foucault outlines this dynamic in the context of

explaining certain strategies that are informed by the perspective of the will to truth, his

account of the workings of power must be kept separate from his account of these tactics.

When Foucault outlines the course of his future research in his inaugural lecture in

1970, he states that, ‘genealogy will study their formation [the formation of discourses], at

once dispersed, discontinuous, and regular’.48

If discourse is inseparable from power and if

power is at the heart of the formation of discourse, then this archaeological language

indicates how power must be understood to function. Discursive power links together

heterogeneous differences, forming in an always unstable way the apparent substantialities

that this underlying heterogeneity also problematises. Power forms a relational network

whose discontinuities cannot be mapped by standard analyses that privilege continuity and

identity. But if power operates in this way, it is incompatible with the will to truth that has

become dominant with the rise of disciplinary forms of power. Furthermore, the will to truth,

because it is a mode of power, necessarily disrupts its own goals: the more it seeks to

localise, identify, and delineate both standards of normality and deviancies, the more its own

operations of dispersion and discontinuity will continue to hinder this aim. It is precisely this

16

incompatibility between aims and effects that compels the intensification of the will to truth

and its expansion into new areas of life.

Discipline and Normalisation

If power works to interpellate49

or compel individuals toward a set of normal identities, then

the irony of both Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume One is that no

‘normal’ individual is ever found. From the perspective of the will to truth, this amounts to a

failure of power to discipline and normalise, but Foucault suggests this was never really the

aim of power. Given that an examination of the various criminal delinquents that modern

society seeks to police reveals that they have always already passed through a myriad of

institutions supposedly designed to correct them,50

how could it ever be said that power

aimed to normalise individuals in the first place? Nor can we say that power effectively

forms deviant individuals, since these individuals persistently escape classification under

such categories: society’s Others, such as Herculine Barbin and Pierre Rivière, remain

enigmatic despite all the energies of medical and legal discourse to individuate, rank, and

comprehend them.51

We must therefore understand the aim of disciplinary and normalising

power, which, like all power, is ‘both intentional and nonsubjective’,52

to be to produce forms

of otherness that are not necessarily knowable but that are compatible with a modern liberal,

capitalist society and that can be invigilated as part of a drive towards increasing social and

economic efficiency – even if numerous inefficiencies are built into this project. The prison,

for example, ‘has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a

politically or economically less dangerous – and, on occasion, usable – form of illegality’.53

In other words, it has produced manageable forms of difference. No successfully constituted

identity, whether normal or deviant, is requisite for this objective.

Historically, the rise of disciplinary and normalising strategies of power correlates

17

with the decline of hierarchical and centralised systems of sovereign power, the development

of capitalism and free market economies, and the rise of social contract understandings of

government. A new form of governmentality is required and it cannot rely on old threats of

punishment and death from the sovereign, but must instead promote the life and efficiency of

the body politic. It is necessary to constitute individuals in certain ways to counterbalance

the new economic and social freedoms that arise with these changes.54

This does not mean

that individuals need to be constituted as ‘the same’ as each other, but it does mean that they

must be constituted against a norm, which serves to measure them. The norm and the various

deviant positions that are mapped out in opposition to it also act as markers that coordinate

the deployment and operation of the various techniques of this new power – observation,

testing, classification, and confession. Unlike the techniques of the sovereign form of power

that precedes them, these strategies operate through both punishment and reward. They are

found diffusely throughout society and while they work through relations of authority and

subordination, they crucially involve the subordinate’s participation in his or her own

disciplining or subjection. But to be subjected to an identity or corrected on the basis of a

normalising judgement is not to be interpellated into this identity. The pettiness and banality

of the disciplining – the child made to stand in the corner, the prisoner made to eat dry bread

with water,55

along with similarly puerile rewards for ‘good behaviour’ – ultimately do little

to bring about conformity, though this does little to prevent their regular and frequent use.

Disciplinary and normalising strategies also differ from those of sovereign power in

their primary level of operation being microscopic. It is not that this microscopic level was

absent in premodern times, but the most prominent mechanisms of the old power did not

make this level the explicit object of their operations. This makes the juridico-discursive

model of power insufficient to understand a modern society ‘that has been more imaginative,

probably, than any other in creating devious and supple mechanisms of power’ and that ‘has

18

gradually been penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are probably irreducible to

the representation of law’.56

This inadequacy holds also for psychoanalytic models that see

the law as constituting the very desire it prohibits or restricts – the question of whether desire

is prior to the law or a product of the law ‘is beside the point’.57

Historically, then, there

arises a new focus on a certain domain of power, rather than, as some interpreters seem to

suggest, the invention of a new, microscopic level of power.

The microscopic and macroscopic are neither simply external to one another nor

internal and identical.58

They are immanent to one another while being reciprocally

determining. Microscopic relations are constitutive but hidden – they operate on the plane

where individuals are constituted, so that the claim that disciplinary practices are microscopic

means that they operate primarily at this constitutive level. Macroscopic power relations hold

between precariously constituted subjects and it is on this level that power can be understood

as a possession of one individual who can choose to exercise or not to exercise it against

another. Power could not operate without the delineation of subject positions that allow the

agents who are associated with them to possess powers that they can use to dominate others,

but this situation refers back to the microscopic flows that condition the appearance of these

positions and their relations to one another. Since these subject positions and relations are

not natural or pregiven, they are necessarily products of power, but this is not a power

possessed by agents. Instead, this power forms ‘a network of relations, constantly in tension,

in activity’.59

Micropowers comprise ‘the moving substrate of force relations which, by

virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local

and unstable’; the macroscopic powers they establish are ‘the over-all effect that emerges

from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to

arrest their movement’.60

But through the ‘double-conditioning’61

of the microscopic and the

macroscopic, the two domains both reinforce and undermine each other. A police officer on

19

the street, a judge in the courtroom, a teacher in school – all have powers that they can choose

to exercise over others, but only by virtue of a context of meanings and subject positions that

they share with those who are subordinate to them and only by virtue of a sense of discipline

that underpins the entire situation. Moreover, the authority of superiors is always unstable,

open to actions by their subordinates that put their legitimacy into question, often using rules

and strategies made available by the same power relations that constitute these hierarchies.62

At the same time, superiors may use the powers they possess to reinforce the microscopic

hierarchies that give them these powers, but these uses are often ambiguous. The use of

police force, for example, can both reinforce and undermine police authority – indeed, often

it does both at once.

If the microscopic level is gives rise to the appearance and positioning of subjects and

objects, then we must refer back to the dynamic of discursive formations to understand how

power at this level operates. For these subjects and objects are formed at the intersections

that link heterogeneous domains and that are therefore replete with divergences and

discontinuities. Micropower relations are relations of disjunction, which arise with practices

as something exceeding them, even while they permeate these practices as something

different. Hence they ‘are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of

relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are

immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and

disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of

these differentiations’.63

This accounts for an important element of resistance residing within

power relations, a resistance that follows from the way power, as a synthesis of disjunction, is

always a relation of discontinuity and disequilibrium. On the one hand, the discursive

domains that are linked together are themselves formed by disjunction and so remain porous

and open to change; on the other hand, any subject, object, or corresponding knowledge will

20

carry ambivalences due to the heterogeneity and flux of its necessary constituents. The 19th

century discourses on human sexuality, already mentioned, provide one example. Another

can be seen in the way divergent oppositional categories are used to reinforce the uncertain

status of various identities deemed to be pathological: ‘When a judgment cannot be framed in

terms of good and evil, it is stated in terms of normal and abnormal. And when it is

necessary to justify this last distinction, it is done in terms of what is good or bad for the

individual’.64

In such instances, the very need to shift from one opposition to another both

sustains the pathological status of the identity in question and problematises its position.

Resistance does in some instances take the form of an opposition to power – for

example, when the treatment of prisoners produces resentment towards the system, leading

not to reform but rather recidivism65

– and there are, occasionally, even ‘great radical

ruptures, massive binary divisions’.66

But the complex discontinuities of micropower

relations and the difference within mutual imbrication of microscopic and macroscopic levels

reveal a range of resistances that go beyond mere opposition. The heterogeneities within

power relations at all levels produce incompatibilities within and among modern disciplinary

institutions and practices. Resistances thus take various roles as ‘adversary, target, support,

or handle in power relations’67

while being ‘the odd term in relations of power’.68

Precisely

because authoritative subjects are constituted in one domain of convergence while the objects

form elsewhere, there arise cross-purposes and frictions between institutions that can function

at all only by acting together. The family and psychiatric bodies, for example, cooperate to

monitor sexuality in the home, but they also come into conflict when psychiatrists seek to

institutionalise family members.69

But there is also the dispersive nature of discursive power,

which overflows all categories of knowledge, producing the indeterminate mutations that

make discourse excessive and dangerous. Thus, the exercise of power to observe and

investigate sexual deviance, by virtue of its inherent voyeurism and the erotic ‘hide and seek’

21

games it encourages, has the effect of proliferating rather than controlling sexual desire.70

Despite superficial appearances, power operates only through indeterminate dispersion, even

while a certain will to truth may be driven to locate, observe, measure, and know all

differences through categories of identity organised in terms of normality and deviance.

Disciplinary and normalising powers produce neither normal citizens nor deviants but

enigmas, which is sufficient to sustain the disciplinary structure necessary for modern

governmentality.

The Self and Politics

Disciplinary and normalising powers may seek to categorise differences according to

standards of normality and deviance, but their own operations always produce something

else. Moreover, the frictions and conflicts within their institutions mean that these powers

operate, in the terms of the will to truth that drives them, only by breaking down.71

Nevertheless, a regularity persists, giving sense and direction to disciplinary practices. This

regularity is the link connecting the heterogeneous domains of desire and truth, which

constitutes desire as a hidden source of truth about the self. It is against the backdrop of this

regularity that Foucault closes The History of Sexuality, Volume One by suggesting the

possibility of ‘a different economy of bodies and pleasures’.72

It would be a mistake to see

this reference to bodies and pleasures as a reference to something outside of power and

discourse – it is part of a strategy that is thoroughly embedded in discourse, targeting a link

that is central to modern discipline. Bringing to the fore the idea that what ought to be

important is the pleasure of the sexual act, it seeks not to escape games of truth but instead to

play them differently.73

Does this leave us with nothing more than different, historically contingent

configurations or senses of power and truth that cannot be judged better or worse with respect

22

to one another? Such a conclusion underplays the import of archaeological and genealogical

analyses. Certainly meaning and knowledge are impossible without disjunctive linkages and

so it is impossible to escape power relations and perhaps also the simulacral unities and

identities that arise from them. Nevertheless, by uncovering the dispersion beneath these

unities, it is possible to glimpse a sense that is overlooked by representational thought and the

will to truth – or, perhaps better, to glimpse the sense of sense, or the sense of sensible

statements as such, which underlies any statement and allows it to ‘make sense’. This second

order of sense is the paradoxical but nonetheless positive content of a dispersion that cannot

be understood in terms of identity and opposition and that is ironed out by oppositional

thought. Rather than the otherness conceived by the will to truth – an excess that lies outside

the boundaries of identity – this sense presents otherness as the immanent excess that disjoins

differences, folding together heterogeneous but mutually imbricated domains.74

Such an

untimely excess arises with our discursive practices, problematising the surface identities and

oppositions that coordinate these practices. In doing so, however, this excess can also help us

modify our practices and ourselves.

Foucault’s final turn to practices of the self cannot be understood without taking this

excess into account, both in terms of the way it exceeds us by traversing and cutting us apart,

demolishing anything within us that might be said to be an homogeneous substance,75

and in

terms of the way it leads us to exceed ourselves. The self-to-self relation is hardly a realm of

freedom divorced from power, since the strategies and practices made available for the self to

train itself are products of games of truth and the meanings and codes they establish. Instead,

the relation resides within a micropolitical realm where selves are constituted through power

relations that interpenetrate them and with which they participate. Nonetheless, because

these power relations are relations of disjunction, dispersion, and strife, this micropolitical

realm is as much a realm of self-creation, self-stylization, and self-experimentation as it is a

23

realm of self-discipline and training.

Precisely because moral codes presuppose a self that fashions itself in order to

position itself in relation to this code,76

this self cannot have the form of the moral subject –

that is, the self-reflexive ‘I’ or ego that separates itself from what it is not in order to take

responsibility for itself – that is supposed to be the end product of this transformation. It

must instead take the form of a unity of dispersion, a complex of heterogeneities with no firm

distinction between inside and outside. Even if the ancient world was no golden age,77

its

ethics provides a picture of what this self that is more nebulous than a moral subject might be.

Self-mastery implies difference within the self, but absent a Christian judgement that

underpins practices of self-sacrifice,78

this difference does not take the form of a hierarchical

opposition between a naturally pure self and a sinful and corrupt Other. Rather, as with the

Greek’s agonistic conception of the self, ‘the adversary that was to be fought, however far

removed it might be by nature from any conception of the soul, reason, or virtue, did not

represent a different, ontologically alien power’.79

Alongside this ‘internal’ complexity of the

self is conceived a multifaceted relation to its environment, which can be seen, for example,

in the way medical appraisals of the sexual act developed subtle measurements of diverse

factors that constituted the act, including social and environmental factors and character

traits.80

The self portrayed in these ethics is, in short, a nexus where socially constituted

rules, practices, techniques, and institutions, along with bodies, pleasures, desires, and

memories, all converge, none of these domains being reducible to the others nor strictly

separated from them.81

But this lack of homogeneity in the self and Foucault’s step back from morality to

ethics would be redundant if the practices of the self did no more than fix it within an identity

or train it to become a subject conforming to a moral code. Any moral system, however,

being constituted by relations of power, is necessarily replete with points of friction and

24

problematisation. For the Greeks, the status of boys is ethically problematic, for even though

the Greeks do not see love of one’s own sex and love of the other to be opposites, they

nevertheless consider the sex act itself in terms of an opposition between activity and

passivity, neither of which was suitable for the boy. For the Romans, pederastic love declines

as an issue, but the care of the self is itself problematised because ethical training is no longer

tied to the status of the freeman who must prepare himself to rule politically in the polis,

leading to the prominent alternatives of a renewed political activism or a withdrawal into

political apathy.82

In both cases, ethical practice becomes more experimental and self-

stylization becomes more subtle. Ethics becomes a negotiation of points of moral ambiguity,

where the oppositions that structure moral systems display their inadequacy and available

alternatives cannot be easily separated into good and bad or right and wrong. But it also

becomes a process of creative self-overcoming. The Greeks, as Foucault shows, used the

problem of the love of boys to expand themselves beyond what they were, creating new ways

of relating to another, of understanding the freedom of the other, and thereby of

understanding themselves.83

Similarly, the problematisation of the self that arose with the

decline of the polis compelled shifts in the ethical relations to one’s spouse and to one’s

society, as well as to oneself.

In these ways, Foucault’s later works develop ethical themes found earlier, when he

writes of the need to combat fascism within the self84

or to think beyond the idea of one’s

adversary as an enemy.85

In those cases too the problem is one of surpassing the logics of

opposition that define the contours of identity and the possibility of an ethics of overcoming

is closely linked to the ability to move beyond conceptions of an homogenous self. The

dimension of ethical negotiation is always present due to the disjunctive nature of power and

the self, and because of the related excess that always accompanies political and ethical

practices. Yet it is perhaps not surprising that both supportive and critical interpreters of

25

Foucault who oppose power and resistance also tend to be allergic to the theme of the care of

the self and to the micropolitics it entails,86

since these do not fit well into more conventional

understandings of politics as a site of power and resistance. Such understandings regularly

link identity and politics, maintaining that the establishment of a collective subject through

the mobilisation of identity – whether this identity is considered to be pregiven and necessary

or historically and contingently constructed – is a precondition for political action. While

these views often accept that a plurality of identities must be incorporated into this collective,

and that the ultimate fixing of identity is impossible, the need for such a marker, and the

concomitant need to negotiate its inevitable failure, still sets the horizon for their political

imagination. It is well known that the erection of the boundaries that separate such

collectives from what they are not has as its cost the erasure of any number of complexities

on both sides of these divides, in many ways repeating the violence of the forms of power

being contested. To this it can be added that these uses of identity miss the way power

actually structures meaning and knowledge because they accept as substantial what is in fact

a fiction or simulacrum generated by a dynamic of dispersion. Yet these erasures and

abstractions are often considered necessary because any positive content without such

negative relations would either be fanciful or would effect a flawed return to an idea of

something that is outside of power, discourse, and relationality.

When Foucault accepts the idea that his work is an ethics that feeds into politics,87

however, he suggests that this is not the way politics needs to be played. If we leave behind

the idea that politics requires in the first instance the construction of an efficacious collective

identity, what emerges is a micropolitical domain of ethical negotiation where what matters is

not the ability to construct an identity but rather the capacity to move beyond crude

oppositions. The sort of positivity that is criticized by many of those who link identity and

politics is one firmly entrenched in the logic of identity and the will to truth. But Foucault

26

articulates a different kind of positivity of power, discourse, and the self, which sustains

relationality while moving it away from negativity and opposition towards an immanent

multiplicity. When we ‘Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative’ by

turning groups and collectives into ‘a constant generator of de-individualization’, as Foucault

advocates in his introduction to Anti-Oedipus,88

we move beyond the need to ground politics

in identities and subjectivities that are mere simulacra. Though Foucault’s work was always

concerned with these categories of identity, his lesson about them, ironically, was that we

should learn to take them rather less seriously.

1 I would like to thank Jane Bennett, Dario Castiglione, William Connolly, Matthew Hammond, Daniel W.

Smith, Yves Winter, and the two anonymous reviewers for EJPT for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of

this paper. This paper was originally presented at the 2003 Political Studies Association Conference in

Leicester, UK.

2 Michel Foucault (1989) The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, pp.

11-14.

3 Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’ in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds) (1982)

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 208-226. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester

Wheatsheaf, pp. 211-212.

4 Ibid., p. 212.

5 Ibid., p. 219.

6 See Jürgen Habermas (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence.

Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 266-292, though Habermas focuses on the incoherence of a critique of rationality

from a perspective of omni-present power, arguing that Foucault cannot escape a fall into relativism and

performative contradiction, and does not examine Foucault’s later work on the self. Although she is

sympathetic to Foucault’s shift to practices of the self and sees it as implicit in his earlier works on power, Lois

MacNay ((1992) Foucault and Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press) still sees the problematic as one in which

disciplinary forms of power dominate and subject individuals, forcing them to become ‘docile bodies’, while the

practices of the self oppose these forms. MacNay also finds Foucault’s theories ultimately need to be

supplemented by Habermasian communicative action. Other readings that can be included under this normative

type are Nancy Hartsock, ‘Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’ in Linda Nicholson (ed) (1990)

Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 157-175. New York and London: Routledge; and Nancy Fraser (1989) Unruly

Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

7 Judith Butler (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London:

Routledge, pp. 9-10.

8 ‘For Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense that “the subject”

who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions does not have access to a

sexuality that is in some sense “outside,” “before,” or “after” power itself. Power, rather than the law,

encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulartory) and the productive (inadvertently generative)

functions of differential relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relations is not

a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The

productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of “subjects” that do

not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact,

culturally intelligible’ ((Judith Butler (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New

27

York and London: Routledge, p. 29). Butler’s ascription of this division of juridical and productive powers to

Foucault is certainly problematic. Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Volume One, does not speak of

juridical forms of power, but rather of juridico-discursive models, which, he argues, may have been sufficient to

describe previous regimes of power but which are incapable of grasping the subtleties of contemporary forms of

power.

9 See Butler (n. 8) pp. 93-106; and Judith Butler (1987) Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-

Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 217-229. According to some of the readings that

adopt this criticism, what Foucault fails to appreciate fully is that the site of resistance is a structural Lack within

power relations themselves: although power may work to fix the identities of its subjects or to compel subjects

towards acts of identification, it must do so in ways that continually reinvoke this Lack, which deconstructs its

formations. This line of argument is found in Saul Newman (2001) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-

Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, esp. ch. 4. I have

reviewed Newman’s book in (2002) History of Political Thought, 23.4: 694-696.

10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, pp.

24, 330.

11 See ibid., esp. pp. 22-28, 327-330.

12 See, for example, Dreyfus and Rabinow (n. 3), pp. 102-105; also Habermas (n. 6), pp. 266-270. It should be

appreciated that Foucault never suggests that these ‘non-discursive’ elements are ever absent or extraneous to

the assemblages that constitute meanings and knowledges, and, as Deleuze notes, he soon abandons the term

and its connotations of being strictly separated from discursive formations, instead conceiving of these

assemblages as being organised by an interplay of the visible and the articulable (see Gilles Deleuze (1988)

Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 9-10, 31-33, and 47-69).

13 Michel Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New

York: Vintage Books, p. 86.

14 Gilles Deleuze (1994) Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: The Athlone Press, p. xix.

15 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.

Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 530-531, n. 39; also Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desire

and Pleasure’ Arnold I. Davidson (ed) (1997) Foucault and His Interlocutors, pp. 183-192. Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press.

16 Indeed, Deleuze seems to jettison completely his earlier critique when he describes resistance as being the

outside of power, in the same way that Deleuzean desire is outside in the sense of being different from any

oppositional schema. See Deleuze (n. 12), esp. pp. 89-90.

17 Foucault (n. 2), p. 21.

18 Ibid., p. 23.

19 Ibid., pp. 31-37.

20 ‘My intention was not to deny all value to these unities or to try to forbid their use; it was to show that they

required, in order to be defined exactly, a theoretical elaboration’ (ibid., p. 71).

21 Ibid., pp. 40-44.

22 See Louis Althusser (1996) For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London and New York: Verso, esp. chs. 3, 6.

23 Foucault (n. 2), pp. 45-46.

24 Ibid., pp. 62, 65-66.

25 Ibid., p. 74.

26 Ibid., p. 86.

27 Ibid, pp. 118-119.

28 Ibid, p. 89.

29 Ibid, p. 98.

30 Ibid, p. 89.

28

31

Ibid, p. 91.

32 Ibid, p. 96.

33 Ibid, p. 120.

34 Ibid., p. 122.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 86.

37 Ibid., p. 12.

38 Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’ in Michael Shapiro (ed) (1984) Language and Politics, pp. 108-

138. New York: NYU Press, p. 109.

39 Ibid., p. 113.

40 Ibid., p. 112.

41 Ibid., p. 114.

42 Foucault (n. 13), p. 54

43 Ibid., pp. 54-55.

44 Ibid., p. 55.

45 Ibid.

46 See ibid., pp. 36-49.

47 A similar point can be made regarding historical analysis, which can accept the contingency of events but

nonetheless reveals its will to truth in the way it reduces events to their chronological sequence: ‘History as

practised today does not turn away from events…But the important thing is that history does not consider an

event without defining the series of which it is part, without specifying the mode of analysis from which that

series derives, without seeking to find out the regularity of phenomena and the limits of probability of their

emergence, without inquiring into the variations, bends and angles of the graph, without wanting to determine

the conditions on which they depend. Of course, history has for a long time no longer sought to understand

events by the actions of causes and effects in the formless unity of a great becoming, vaguely homogeneous or

ruthlessly hierarchized; but this change was not made in order to rediscover structures, alien and hostile to the

event. It was made in order to establish diverse series, intertwined and often divergent but not autonomous,

which enable us to circumscribe the ‘place’ of the event, the margins of its chance variability, and the conditions

of its appearance’ (Foucault (n. 38), p. 128).

48 Foucault (n. 38), p. 132.

49 On the Althusserian notion of interpellation see ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes

towards an Investigation)’ in Louis Althusser (1984) Essays on Ideology, pp. 1-60. London: Verso. See also

Butler (n. 7), pp. 121-124.

50 Michel Foucault (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:

Vintage Books, p. 301.

51 See Michel Foucault (ed) (1975) I Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother:

A Case of Parricide in the 19th

Century. Trans. Frank Jellinek. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska

Press; and (1980) Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French

Hermaphrodite. Introduced by Michel Foucault. Trans. Richard McDougall. New York: Pantheon Books.

52 Foucault (n. 13), p. 94.

53 Foucault (n, 50), p. 277.

54 See Michel Foucault (1991) Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Trans. R. James

Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 171-172.

55 See ‘Intellectuals and Power’ in Michel Foucault (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected

Essays and Interviews, pp. 205-217. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 210.

56 Foucault (n. 13), pp. 86, 89.

29

57

Ibid., p. 89.

58 ‘There is no discontinuity between them, as if one were dealing with two different levels (one microscopic

and the other macroscopic); but neither is there homogeneity (as if the one were only the enlarged projection or

miniaturization of the other)’ (ibid., pp. 99-100).

59 Foucault (n. 50), p. 26.

60 Foucault (n. 13), p. 93.

61 Ibid., pp. 99-100.

62 In the United States, one strategy for problematising the authority of an authority figure is to ask defiantly,

‘who do you think you are?’ In societies that are more status oriented, the question might be, ‘do you know who

you are talking to?’ – a question that is generally ineffective in the US and tends to get many celebrities arrested

on the spot. These tactics are dictated by the rules of discursive games and so they are not outside or opposed to

power but are rather the result of the discontinuities that power relations inevitably establish. They provide

possibilities to disrupt, even if only briefly, microscopic hierarchies and even if such strategies are not

revolutionary it would be hard to suggest that they are not, in some sense, political.

63 Foucault (n. 13), p. 94.

64 ‘Revolutionary Action: “Until Now”’ in Foucault (n. 55), pp. 218-233, p. 230.

65 See Foucault (n. 50), pp. 264-268.

66 Foucault (n. 13), p. 96.

67 Ibid., p. 95.

68 Ibid., p. 96. Elsewhere, Foucault acknowledges that both dispersed procedures of power and multiple forms

of resistance can be integrated into ‘global strategies’, but he still warns: ‘one should not assume a massive and

primal condition of domination, a binary structure with “dominators” on one side and “dominated” on the other,

but rather a multiform production of relations of domination which are partially susceptible of integration into

overall strategies’ (Michel Foucault (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-

1977. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Ed. Colin Gordon. Brighton: The

Harvester Press, Ltd., p. 142).

69 Ibid., pp. 111-112.

70 Ibid., pp. 44-45

71 This may be compared with the functioning of desiring machines in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983)

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

72 Foucault (n. 13), p. 159.

73 See Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’ in James Bernauer and David

Rasmussen (eds) (1988) The Final Foucault, pp. 1-20. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, p. 15.

74 This excess is worked out in relation to Foucault’s ethical works in Sue Golding, ‘The Politics of Foucault’s

Poetics, or, better yet: The Ethical Demand of Ecstatic Fetish’ in Judith Squires (ed) (June, 1995) Michel

Foucault: J’Accuse (New Formations), pp. 40-47. No. 25.

75 Parallels can be drawn here to Lyotard’s understanding of ‘the jews’ as an excess that cuts up the soul. See

Jean-François Lyotard (1990) Heidegger and “the jews”. Trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, esp. p. 17.

76 See Michel Foucault (1985) The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert

Hurley. London: Penguin Books, Introduction.

77 Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress’ in Paul Rabinow (ed)

(1984) The Foucault Reader, pp. 340-372. London: Penguin Books, pp. 344-351.

78 Such a sacrifice of the self is the premise of the Christian practices of exomologesis and exogoreusis. See

Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’ in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed) (1999)

Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, pp. 158-181. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

79 Foucault (n. 76), p. 68.

30

80

See Michel Foucault (1986) The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert

Hurley. London: Penguin Books, pp. 116-117.

81 This conception of the self as a nexus of interpenetrating material, social, and visceral relations has been

developed prominently in political theory in the work of William Connolly, most recently in (2002)

Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, esp. ch. 4.

82 See Foucault (n. 76), pp. 185-225 and (n. 80), pp. 37-68, 189-232.

83 I owe this point to an excellent paper entitled ‘How does one think with what is already thinking?’ delivered

by Matthew Hammond at the Exeter SHiPSS Graduate Conference, 28 May 2003.

84 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ in Deleuze and Guattari (n. 71), pp. xi-xiv.

85 See Foucault (n. 54), pp. 180-181.

86 On the other hand, for readings that work with the theme of micropolitics see Golding (n. 74), Connolly (n.

81) and Deleuze (n. 12), pp. 94-123.

87 See Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and Ethics: An Interview’ in Rabinow (n. 77), pp. 373-380, p. 375.

88 Foucault (n. 84), p. xiii.