ABSTRACT
In one sense, the final phase of Foucault’s work on power or “governmentality” involves no violent shift of direction. The Nietzschean and Heideggerian heritage drawn upon in Madness and Civilization, the history of science of The Birth of the Clinic, the reading of the Gothic novelists and even The Archaeology of Knowledge were all directed at showing how certain discursive practices shape individuals and, indirectly, the institutions in which lives are led. In his early work, Foucault rarely shows signs of forgetting either that knowledge alters the world, thereby entering into relation with power or that, in reverse, the slow, often haphazard, construction of institutions, the articulation of styles of living, the techniques drawn upon to fashion selves, all not only require, but alter, knowledge. Yet although there is no radical break between the earlier and the later work, after Foucault had elaborated his archaeology, power did acquire a new relation to knowledge. In The Order of Things Foucault regards modern discourse as the dissolution of the a-temporal order of mathesis, as an attempt to appropriate the non-representable forces and conditions of historicity and life. When he moves the direct thrust of his analysis from modern discourse to modern power, he finds that, whereas in classical society, power was fixed, visible, mappable, in modern society it is uncontainable, untheorizable, productive-like modern discourse in fact. And he can now show that the central assumption of modern discourse-its anthropological sense that “man” is the subject of knowledge-rests upon, and is an effect of, massively complex power relations. To speak the language of theory: anthropomorphizing power must be both totalizing, so as to turn the Other into the Same, and dispersed, to work on and connect to the Other as Other. This means that what he had earlier formulated as the tendency of modern knowledge to splinter into singular énoncés, is now transformed into a vision of the social and historical field as a kind of disarticulated articulation, a field of power events, where the emphasis is simultaneously on “field” and on “events.” This shift from knowledge to power, however, has profound consequences for his sense of his own social function. Politically, this field can only be contested in a “micro-politics,” a tactical response to particular situations, rather than in organizations that constitute representative democracy like the political party. This, together with Foucault’s archeological sense that “theoretical” (that is, generalizing and self-reflective)
statements have no special capacity to direct action, allows him to argue that “universal intellectuals” will, in our time, lose ground to “specific intellectuals.”1
