ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault argued that ideology is “a notion that cannot be used without circumspection” (Rabinow 1984:60) and offered three reasons for this. First, ideology “always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count for truth” (60), something less mystified and more objective. Second, it is secondary to “something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc.” (60)—often the state and its juridical representations. Third, it refers to a subject who takes ideology in and is repressed or oppressed by it, or who dreams, suggest Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, of “a quasitransparent form of knowledge, free from all error and illusion” (cited in Rabinow, 59). All of this poses ideology as part of “a” negative and coherent metapower. Foucault’s ideas, by contrast, point us in the direction of regimes of truth that are produced “only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint and induce regular effects of power” (723)—good and bad, positive and negative. Such regimes stipulate:
the types of discourse which [they] accept and make function as true; the mechanism and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
