"the 'mind' as a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool..."

Early in the chapter “Generalized Punishment,” Foucault describes a rising call to reform in the eighteenth century presented on humanitarian grounds. Throughout the chapter, he draws attention to the manner in which this reform discourse was bound up in socio-economic changes taking place at the time which prompted newfound concerns with efficiency, stating that “the criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power (79).” With an interest in restructuring the distribution of the power to punish, the reformers brought about a new strategy in which this power to punish might be performed which “insert[ed] the power to punish more deeply into the social body (82).”

With the restructuring of criminality as crime against society and its body of members in place of the sovereign, “the right to punish [had] been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society (90).” Attention was moved more explicitly to the relationship between a crime and its effect on the social body. According to Foucault, this move established the nature of punishment through a kind of calculation, where “what has to be arranged and calculated are the return effects of punishment on the punishing authority and the power that it claims to exercise (91).” Further, “in order to be useful, punishment must have as its objective the consequences of the crime…the series of disorders that it is capable of initiating…one must calculate a penalty in terms not of the crime, but of its possible repetition (92-3).”

What Foucault calls the “punitive city,” which relied upon a certain degree of visibility to the public in order to function appropriately in the prevention of crime, soon became replaced with another form of punishment more ‘corrective’ in nature. This form utilized the prison system with a focus on coercion and the production of reformed obedient individuals. While the first method of punishment required public visibility to function, its successor depended upon a level of secrecy and control over the individual’s actions, necessities to which the prison structure was formally conducive. This secrecy allows for penalty through imprisonment to be representative versus corporeal, enabling a greater effectiveness of the penalty by heightening an assumed level of disadvantage through “the idea of pain, displeasure, inconvenience – the ‘pain’ of the idea of ‘pain’ (94).”

I found this discussion of representative versus corporeal punishment to be of particular interest while attempting to imagine what it is that Foucault means when he says that the practice of punishment becomes no longer enacted upon the body but is rather carried out through/upon the soul. The function of this method of punishment no longer isolates specific individuals as beings outside of the law defined by a specific time and place in which a crime was carried out, rather it establishes all members of the society as potential criminals. Foucault’s explanation of the manner in which this punishment method operates with the aim of preventing crime seems to reflect much of how what is now commonly referred to as ‘the politics of fear’ in the age of the ‘war on terrorism’ aimed to function: through a “shift in the point of application of this power [to punish]: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings in the ritual of public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all (101, emphasis added).”

Foucault, Michel. "Generalized Punishment." Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books: New York, 1995 (org. published 1977.) 73-103.

The Discourse on Language and Rules Controlling Discourse Within Academia

In his conclusion to The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault addresses various issues that others may have with his work including, for example, potential criticisms of his use of structuralism despite fervently repeated claims of not considering himself a structuralist, as well as his apparent disregard for the role of agency, of “the real action of men and in their possibilities,” in the production of knowledge. In his very last response, he acknowledges why his work would encounter such an overwhelming body of criticisms due to the manner in which they shake the very foundations of much of the intellectual work performed by those reading his work as well as the identity that those individuals procure from the very work that they engage in (208).

In addition to other statements and exclamations made within this closing section illuminating his awareness of the discomfort brought about from his work, Foucault exclaims, “how unpleasant it is to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice where one is used to seeing, in all its pure transparency, the expression of genius and freedom (210).” My own response: “Indeed!” Upon reading this particular expression, I immediately made a connection between his point and what I have tended to naively refer to as the ‘politics of the academy’ (a term that I admit encompasses many other issues to speak of, but functions as an umbrella term here for the direction in which I wish to move just as well,) as ‘academia,’ an institution which, in a removed point of view through the frame of its own ideal concept, is characterized by if not simply defined as a space in which any number of ideas may possess the room and encouragement to run, skip and leap freely. At closer inspection, perhaps through material encounters with or actual participation in the institution (in which ever form this may take,) it is clear that this ideal notion of higher education and the academy as a purely free space is clearly far from ideal, and that even in such an institution which publicly projects an image-identity of openness and progress, power and control are still very much at work. My intended point here, however, is not to reiterate the obvious (a point that can be easily classified under and explained by such universalized proverbs as “everything isn’t what it seems,”) as it can easily be deduced that such rules controlling discourse as presented in his lecture The Discourse on Language, for example that of exclusion (whether through the prohibition of words or of individuals as speaking subjects through denial of access to positions from which one may be ‘allowed’ to produce knowledge and be established as credible,) are present and operating within the institution of academia, rather it is to expand somewhat upon Foucault’s expression in his conclusion (as quoted above) to discuss the limitations of a scholar to critically analyze the operations of control of knowledge as they function within her own space of work and inform her identity.

As Foucault mentioned in the conclusion, it is particularly difficult to view those things that one has otherwise accepted as a space of freedom, such as the institution of higher education, in which the perpetual birth of new ideas is assumed to be unhindered and promoted with gracious care and praise, through the analytical lens which he is suggesting which may challenge the very defining principles around which such an institution is built is purported to identify. I argue that this is particularly true for the scholar, as an individual who is, through this lens, understood as both an instrument of that institution, contributing to its function and capacity to control discourse and the production of knowledge, but also as a subject of it, limited, shaped, and essentially controlled through this subjection despite having otherwise an impression or assumption of possessing individuality and agency over one’s ideas. To challenge this assumption would be to dismantle the entire notion/identity of ‘the scholar,’ as the manner in which individuals have been defined by their collections (or totalities) of their ‘great works’ (as Foucault would call oeuvres) through which we have traditionally understood and given value to what has often been called the ‘great minds’ of our time, would be highlighted as not only shaped and constructed through the ritual practices of the institution, but also otherwise irrelevant.

I wish to further expound upon the limitations of an individual who would otherwise call themselves (or be called) an academic to critically view the institution of higher education through the lens Foucault sets forth in his work. It may be arguable that such an individual would be in a position that prevents them from engaging in work which would essentially discredit their place and disassemble their identity which enables them to engage in such work in the first place. One might consider instead, the epistemological privilege provided/possessed by those outside of this position, but rather on the outside looking in. (Perhaps not even this, as the phrase “on the outside looking in” presupposes a clear boundary between the two as if there were no interaction or relationship outside of an assumed binary opposition. Instead, perhaps the most fit individual to engage in such analysis would rather be, for example, the student who, as neither fixed in the outside but still prevented access to the positions provided through such ritualized thresholds as obtaining a diploma, publishing work, or making tenure, holds no ‘position’ but rather exists in a transitory state and in doing so, trespasses this boundary.)

Perhaps this is of particular importance in considering Foucault’s position in creating and applying his own work to critical analysis of the institutions to which he belongs as scholar. How can he speak of the operations of power and control of discourse in knowledge production and propose a radical challenge to this operation and yet through his position as a well-respected scholar, embody the very things that he finds fault in and proposes to challenge?


Foucault, Michel. "Conclusion," "Discourse on Language." The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. 199-213, 215-238.

Foucault's 'Archeology'

In the first few chapters of Part IV “Archeological Description” of his larger work The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault sets out to better clarify his notion of ‘archeology’ as a new form of analysis which challenges traditional methodologies in the study (and even the basic conceptualization) of history as we have come to presently know it. Foucault points out various faults that he finds in this traditional methodology, which he refers to as “the history of ideas,” with a particular focus on the central issue of “the division of discourse into great unities (135).” His initial suggestion of a new approach to analysis through ‘archeology,’ a practicing of a “different history,” is then followed by a process of differentiating it from the traditional “history of ideas,” characterized by a focus on the “great themes” of “genesis, totality, [and] totalization,” which he claims continues to be perpetuated in “an age no longer made for it (138).” He precedes this process of differentiation by clearly asking the question he would otherwise have certainly encountered by others critically reviewing his work: “What can ‘archeology’ offer that other descriptions are unable to provide (136)?”

In an attempt to provide an overview of the differences that he lays out between the two methodologies (that is, between the traditional “history of ideas” and Foucault’s proposed ‘archeology’,) I will briefly summarize first the 4 main points establishing what Archeology is not (so as to better elucidate what it in fact is, but also the elements that make it particularly distinct from those problematic elements of the ‘history of ideas’ to which he is challenging.)

1. ‘Archeology’ is not defining “thoughts…images…themes [;etc]…” within discourses, “but the discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules (138).” Discourse is not to be understood as a document, but rather as a monument. Archeological analysis is not interpretive, “seek[ing] another better-hidden discourse,” and is not allegorical (139).

2. ‘Archeology’ does not involve working through some notion of a time-line, with an understanding of discourse based on precedents, origins, or destinations ;etc, but involves “defin[ing] discourses in their specificity (139).”

3. In ‘archeology,’ the ‘oeuvre’ doesn’t matter. “The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d’être of an oeuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it (139).”

4. In ‘archeology,’ the origin is of no concern. “It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin, it is the systematic description of a discourse-object (140).”


Foucault, Michel. "Archeology and the History of Ideas." The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

The Statement and "the Rule of Repeatable Materiality"

In chapter 2, “the Enunciative Function,” of Part III “the Statement and the Archive” from his work The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault outlines four conditions of the ‘enunciative function’ to further explain the “special mode of existence” characteristic of what he calls the ‘statement (88).’ The last of these conditions that received attention within the chapter is that of materiality. Foucault states this material existence as a necessary condition in order for any series of signs or body of successive linguistic elements to be analyzed as a statement largely because the “material status of the statement are part of its intrinsic characteristics (100).”

This focus on materiality of the statement becomes even more interesting when one might be thinking in terms of the transmutability of the statement. When one thinks of more common conceptions of “the statement” (I’m reaching outside of Foucault’s definition here), the term connotes something that is rather solid and unshifting. Foucault’s ‘statement,’ however, “must have a substance, a support, a place, and a date [and] when these requisites change, it [the statement] too changes identity (101).” As such, a statement cannot be repeated in a similar manner in which an enunciation is “an unrepeatable event” in that “it has situated and dated uniqueness that is irreducible (101).” This automatically makes me think of contemporary society in which information travels at the speed of light and the ability to reproduce statements is not only easy but also within the capacity of individuals from multiple levels of society, a possibility due largely to newer media forms enabled by the emergence of computers and the widespread accessibility of the internet. For example, how might a statement change when communicated or enacted through different mediums of communication and dispersal. How do statements change as the contexts from which they are experienced shift?

Soon after considering this, I encountered what Foucault terms the “rule of repeatable materiality” in which statements may be the same, for example, in multiple printings of the same edition of a book despite the minute differences in each material object printed. Even further, however, the form which communicates a statement may also vary in its precise nature (a poster version of a statement that is also printed in a book) without necessarily requiring that this other form be read as an entirely different statement as “the materiality of the statement is not defined by the space occupied or the date of its formation; but rather its status as a thing or object...[it] cannot be identified with a fragment of matter; but its identity varies with a complex set of material institutions…it defines possibilities of reinscription and transcription (102-3).”

So in our world of reproduction, a statement may maintain its identity despite multiple copies of itself, even in various formats. Still there is a point in which the statement, in its reproduction or placement in certain contexts, must be understood as something different, perhaps, from its original engendering or enactment. Foucault elaborates on this quality through the notion of a particular “field of stabilization” enjoyed by statement which “makes it possible, despite all the differences of enunciation, to repeat them in their identity (103).” However, he states that this same field may also “define a threshold beyond which there can be no further equivalence, and the appearance of a new statement must be recognized (103).” For example, although a certain statement encountered in a book may maintain its identity in a copy of that statement which takes its form in a poster, if that poster also included other elements such as a poster brand or a “this printing made possible by the American League of White Supremacists” caption, the statement may become something different or may even be demolished in its entirety and replaced by a new statement as a kind of appropriation of the statement which might serve to debunk its initial conception or identity. If the identity of the statement “is itself relative and oscillates according to the use that is made of the statement and the way in which it is handled,” what might be said, for example, of the different statements that might be identified from an 8^th grade American History textbook’s presentation of the declaration of independence, a pocket sized Declaration of Independence provided free to legal citizens of the United States by the government, a recitation of the Declaration of Independence at an NRA meeting; etc (104). This way of viewing the statement may also be of use when looking at acts of cultural subversion, either in performance, or, for example, in acts of culture jamming.

Foucault, Michel. "The Enunciative Function." The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

The Politics of Retrospection

The Archeology of Knowledge represents Foucault’s attempt to more clearly explain and delineate his particular approach to exploring the historical subject as performed in his earlier works including Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. As he states that his endeavor in these works was unclear, “a very imperfect sketch (15),” Archeology of Knowledge is the answer to the confusion and conceptual blurriness that he acknowledged in those works preceding it. In his introduction and first few chapters, Foucault makes his critical focus on traditions of historical analysis clear, acknowledging an array of problems that he sees with the methodological field of history.

One of his main points that I would like to further discuss is that of the politics of retrospection. In his introduction, Foucault states that “historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge (5).” In addition, and perhaps more explicitly stated in his first chapter “The Unities of Discourse,” “after all, ‘literature’ and ‘politics’ are recent categories, which can be applied to Medieval culture, or even classical literature, only by a retrospective hypothesis (22, emphasis added).” According to Foucault, it is important to be cognizant of the present position one might hold when looking into the past with a critical eye or upon viewing past events or practices through a conceptual lens whose very crafting is due to a particular notion of history defined simultaneously by a streamlined continuity (everything is connected, here is the origin, which explains this development which influenced this and so forth and so on until we arrive at our present moment) and by the breaking up into parts (for example of eras) with relatively precise points of origin and points of expiration. For example, in looking at a particular societal practice based on monuments from a distant past in remaining availability in the present day (“monuments,” which Foucault argues that traditional historical methodology turns into “documents” to then be organized, “divid[ed]…distribute[ed]” ;etc (6)) the viewer, from her position in a present day moment imposes, in a sense, a particular understanding of that practice and its meaning based on certain notions that have come to be naturalized to a certain extent due to their presentation as the end of a longer rope whose concept is thought of as having been consistently existent from some historical origin in time. For example, even the notion of looking at monuments to discover something about a “societal” practice suggests an imposition of a concept of “society” and what that might mean. One might even extend this problem found within historical methodology to that of cross-cultural criticism. For example, upon attempting to “read” the practices of another culture, even from a shared point in time, one must be cognizant of ones assumptions of certain universalities, such as a certain moral or ethical code; etc.

How does he propose one might respond to this problem that tends to be overlooked or unacknowledged? He states that a “precaution must be taken to disconnect the unquestioned continuities by which we organize, in advance, the discourse that we are to analyze (25).” He continues further:

“What we must do, in fact, is to tear away from their virtual
self-evidence, and to free the problems that they pose; to
recognize that they are not the tranquil locus on the basis
of which other questions (concerning their structure, coherence,
systematicity, transformations) may be posed, but that they
themselves pose a whole cluster of questions (26, emphasis added).”

And once again, particularly drawing attention to the potential accessing and making visible those practices which otherwise remain invisible (especially in terms of cross-cultural readings):

“by freeing them (facts of discourse) of all the groupings
that purport to be natural, immediate, universal unities, one
is able to describe other unities, but this time by means of a
group of controlled decisions… Providing one defines the conditions
clearly, it might be legitimate to constitute, on the basis of correctly
described relations, discursive groups that are not arbitrary,
and yet remain invisible (26).”

Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Shock and Silencing, "curing" on a societal level

I stumbled upon this video today and, although it goes in quite a different direction, I think that some of the ideas Foucault presents in his book Madness and Civilization (and well as later in Discipline and Punish) can be seen in this display of the use of shock and crisis to alter a society's state of being and therefore their compliance with certain expected actions/beliefs.

Naomi klein - la stratégie du choc
by masesami

Other connections that might be made between Foucault's ideas and the video include the connection between the prisoner criminal and the confined madman, particularly in the association between the madman and criminality. The use of shocking an individual into a certain childlike state implies a re-installation of a kind of power structure based on that of the patriarchal family with doctors and scientists (and other positions of authority which have in some way been validated by science [such as the economist in the video] at the father position "looking out only for the good of the subject." The video discusses very literal uses of shock on prisoners intentionally applied through various methods to bring those individuals to a certain state of compliance and docility. However it also plays upon the manner in which the individual and societal experience of shock resulting from certain national and/or global catastrophes (both natural and man-made) are essentially used or taken advantage of for political purposes and for keeping the citizen body in a state of perpetual compliance and docility, trustworthy (to an extent) of those visible and invisible authoritative bodies which are there claiming to carry out operations for the best interest of those citizens. I say perpetual compliance because it can be argued that certain tools under the command of authoritative bodies or those in positions of power, such as the media, military; etc, are used in such a way as to keep the citizen in a continual state of shock (an idea mentioned in the video as well).

The role of silencing and acts ensuring isolation as a means of maintaining this state of shock and therefore a state of docile complicity might be applied to the experience of United States citizens following the events that took place on September 11, 2001 in New York. It goes unsaid that the nation as a citizen body experienced those events with shock and the symptoms that accompany it. It has often been the subject of great debate and discussion as to the manner in which the nation's former government under the direction of former present Bush handled the situation and the nation's state of shock by calling out to each individual citizen to do their patriotic duty and go out and shop. During this past presidential election, then future-President Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for taking advantage of the grieving nation and, most notably, for missing what Obama believed to have been a momentous opportunity to unite the public through acts of service to their fellow citizens and local communities. In thinking about this issue after having read the last chapter in Madness and Civilization titled "The Birth of the Asylum" as well as having watched this video on shock, I can't help but view the actions of the Bush administration following the nation's shock-inducing tragedy as one which prolonged a sense of shock by encouraging silence and isolation. How? Firstly, through the manner in which we were each called to "go out and shop," a practice which is personal and performed on an individual, often anonymous basis (regardless of its moving in and out of shared spaces...no serious dialogue takes place in the grocery store.) Secondly, the manner in which we received new information was provided through the unforgettable terror alert system of color coded signs to keep each individual on their toes regarding a state of fear or expectation of something potentially happening, with the color bar changing to a suggestively scarier level at what seemed like random intervals. The very reception of information in this way through the television is, like in that of shopping, an experience defined by its isolating nature in which changing information regarding potential danger is communicated to each individual personally.
Similarly, the national focus on this concept of national unity through patriotism might be understood as a kind of religion. In discussing the changing experience of madness, Foucault highlights the role of religion as being "the concrete form of what cannot go mad (244)." Likewise, religion is something experienced on a personal level and yet provides the religious individual with the illusion that she is part of a greater body/family/community. Fear is the instrument of religion to keep its followers along the "right path." Alongside fear remains the sense of an ever-present judicial body, one which threatens to judge you for a misstep, one which promises to punish should you, for instance, decide to verbalize an opinion viewed as anti-American in that it questions the practices of those in authoritative positions, it questions the doctor, the scientist, the father.


Foucault, Michel. "The Great Fear," "The New Division," "The Birth of the Asylum." Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage, 1988.

The Emergence of Morality

In addition to the first applications of Foucault’s concept of discourse, another theme that emerges in the text that I would like to comment on is that of morality in the understanding of madness and the madman as well as the proposed “treatment” of it. This topic seems to emerge most distinctly in the chapter entitled “Doctors and Patients” in which Foucault moves from the previous chapter which more so delineates various forms of madness and their respective symptoms and into the methods in which these forms and symptoms were “treated.” In the chapter, Foucault notes the fact that madness had not always been viewed as an illness which could be treated by various means. Still, even when the concept of a “cure” first came into being, it should not be understood as being medical in nature. Rather than the kind of treatment that might be received for an illness of sorts in a hospital which would essentially “correct” a problem, madness in the Classical period was understood in terms of morality and an interconnection between the body and the soul which might be said to have developed out of theories of the passions. As such, this “cure” of the madman must be something that treats not only body but the entire individual, with the soul certainly included.

It was the development of certain ideas concerning the involvement or influence of one’s lifestyle upon one’s state of madness or lack there-of which allowed medicine to bring in certain moral positions into the nature or concept of the “cure” for madness. While preceding the Classical period, madness might have been perceived as something apart from those “normal” individuals understood to still possess their sanity, now it was seen as something of a symptom of a certain kind of lifestyle and as such, was able to be made subject to the disapproval of medicine. Perhaps most interesting is the point Foucault makes concerning the development of Psychology as its own branch of medicine as being unable to exist as we know it without the central element of morality in its initial foundation.



Foucault, Michel. "Passion and Delirium," "Aspects of Madness," "Doctors and Patients." Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage, 1988.