ABSTRACT
From 1970 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault occupied a special chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France. It has been said that there are "a thousand Foucaults." The multifaceted man has left behind an equally multifaceted, equally challenging intellectual legacy. Is the author of Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (translated by R. Howard [New York: Random House, 1965]) a "phenomenologist" or a "structuralist"? Is the author of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (translated by A. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Random House, 1970]) and the Archaeology of Knowledge (translated by A. Sheridan-Smith [London: Harper Colophon, 1972]) an idealist or perhaps a realist? A radical epistemological relativist or perhaps instead something of an old-fashioned positivist? Is the author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (translated by A. Sheridan [New York: Pantheon Books, 1977]), from which I have chosen an excerpt, a "theorist of the total system" or instead a surveyor of the local and the piecemeal? Is the author of the three volumes of a "history of sexuality" less historian than anthropologist? Less anthropologist than philosopher? I do not propose even to try to answer any of these questions here. Better simply to reiterate one of Foucault's own comments: that neither in his earlier nor in his later works did he seek to develop a "theory," whether of knowledge or of power; that throughout, he consistently sought instead to develop an analytics of subjects and subjectivities. The Order of Things might well be read as Foucault's exposé of the paradoxes inherent in making of Kant's own transcendental subject the axiomatic foundation of an empirical "science of man." Indeed, the final two chapters of The Order of Things arguably contain among the earliest systematic critiques of the Kantian current of social thought itself. Discipline and Punish has a broader focus and offers a broader critique: not simply of the sciences but also of the "disciplines," the technologies and institutions that define, produce, and reproduce "normal" subjects and their "abnormal" or "deviant" counterparts. Our excerpt treats the intimacy of the relation between the production and reproduction of "disciplined" subjects, normal or deviant, and the mechanisms of what Foucault terms "panopticism." His inspiration is Jeremy Bentham's design for the Panopticon, a circular prison that, had it ever been built, would have been endowed with a central tower from whose dark interiors guardsmen might keep watch, all-seeing but invisible to those whom they were charged to survey.
