ABSTRACT
This chapter entertains the conceit of summarizing Michel Foucault's canonical texts, and their evolution over the course of his intellectual career, in order to analyze how his analytics of power hails consumer culture researchers to recognize themselves as Foucauldians. Foucault's oeuvre is characterized by three discernible phases: his archaeology of knowledge period; his genealogical turn; and, a third nexus of writings exploring the technologies of self and practices of ethical self-governance. Foucault's archaeological arguments explicitly rebuked historical accounts, which depict the development of human knowledge as steadily advancing toward an ideal of objective, settled knowledge. Foucault's genealogical phase did not offer a theory of power per se but, rather, an analytics of power. In Foucault's genealogical analyses, discourses are now one component of the power relations that forge contextually specific alignments among institutional structures and practices, subject positions, material conditions, and larger historical processes.
