Page 127 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

Foucault on knowledge and power
In Foucault’s writings from the mid-1970s, we find a similar repu-
diation of the older structuralist aspirations to scientificity. Here,
however, post-structuralism had moved in a very different, even
opposed, direction: certainly, Foucault himself remained dis-
missive of Derrida’s ‘little pedagogy’ (Foucault, 1972a, p. 602).
Foucault relativised discourse not by any radical reconstruction
of the notion of signification itself, but by the attempt to substitute
relations of power for relations of meaning. ‘I believe one’s point
of reference should not be to the great model of language ...and
signs’, argued Foucault, ‘but to that of war and battle. The history
that bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than
that of a language’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 114). The term coined to
describe this later approach was ‘geneaology’, as distinct from
‘archaeology’. The text that announced the shift was Discipline
and Punish, a study of the birth of the modern prison (Foucault,
1979). For Foucault himself, there was little novelty in a focus on
the interconnectedness of discursive and institutional practices
as such. The real theoretical innovation here consisted, first, in a
new sense of this connectedness as necessarily internal to
discourse; and, second, in a growing awareness of the human
body itself as the central object of control in such institutions as
the prison, but also as the source of possible resistance to that
control.
For Foucault, power in modern society had become essentially
ubiquitous. Thus he spoke of its ‘capillary form of existence...
the point where power reaches into the very grain of individ-
uals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and
attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’
(Foucault, 1980, p. 39). Famously, Foucault takes Bentham’s plan
for a ‘Panopticon’—a central tower from which a supervisor
would be able to monitor simultaneously the behaviour of a large
number of supervised prisoners, patients, madmen, workers or
whatever—as ‘the architectural figure’ of this radical extension
of the mechanisms of control, regulation and self-control in
modern societies (Foucault, 1979, p. 200). The argument has been
misrepresented as itself Benthamite and Foucault as himself some
kind of latter-day utilitarian (Bennett, 1998, pp. 82–4). But the

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