3
A New Kind of History
If the Marxist concept of labor cannot serve as the organizing principle of historical research, the question of an alternative theory becomes urgent. In this chapter I delineate the main features of Foucault's theory of history and assess its merits as a new general framework for historians.
In the past few decades the discipline of history has been revolutionized by new methodologies and new objects of study which fall under the rubric of 'social history'. Journals like the Annales in France and Past and Present in England have been the centers of the new concerns. Topics like population, the city, the family, women, classes, sports and psychobiography have risen to prominence over more traditional historical subjects. Methodologies have been imported from every social science: econometrics from economics, family reconstitution from demography, 'thick interpretation' from anthropology, voting analysis from political science, questionnaire analysis and class analysis from sociology, psychoanalysis from psychology. Once a field in. the humanities relying on narrative writing, history has become a potpourri of social science methods. Not since Ranke's time has history undergone such dramatic revisions. Marxists have benefited from the new eclecticism as historical materialism has finally been accepted by the profession. Another index of the change is the new status of psycho-history. It was only a
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short time ago that Erik Erikson's masterful study of Martin Luther was spurned by historians, not even receiving a review in the American Historical Review. Today there are courses on psycho-history, journals of psycho-history and conferences at major universities on psycho-history.
It goes without saying that there is considerable confusion. A standard curriculum in history is a thing of the past. While there is much to be said for the intellectual vigor of the situation, it is also possible to conclude despairingly that the discipline is shattered into countless splinters and will never again take on a recognizable shape. It may instead be absorbed by the individual social sciences as an ornament to their own concerns. A major reason for the incoherence of historical writing today is the absence of theoretical reflection by the practitioners of social history. Marxist historiographers are, one would think, an exception, since their writing derives from a well-articulated theoretical tradition. Yet that is not always the case. One of the most prominent Marxist historians, Edward Thompson, looks upon theory with no more understanding than does his cat, to judge from his recent revealingly titled polemic against Althusser, The Poverty of Theory (1978). While Thompson's anti-theoretical animus is not shared by all Marxist historians, a major tendency in their writing is to adopt empiricist positions only bolstered by a strong political commitment to socialism. The non-Marxist social historians are for their part even more adamant in ignoring the theoretical presuppositions of their work. A large segment of them simply adopt a quantitative methodology and pursue the facts defined by the method, never examining the conceptual parameters of the field constituted by that method. Thus in Peter Laslett's writing, family history is reduced to the number of blood relations residing in the same household. Since statistical precision is required, questions about family life that are not quantifiable become irrelevant and are suppressed. In general, however, among social historians, methodological purity does not suppress intellectual
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curiosity and the new tendencies must be regarded with favor.
Nevertheless, despite clear advances, the opportunity raised by social history to question the basic assumptions of the field constituted by historical investigation has gone unrecognized.1 The mere variety of topics pursued by historians today encourages a rigorous examination of the theoretical assumptions of the field. If family history, urban history, women's history and environmental history are all valid fields of investigation, what are the principles by which one chooses to do one or the other? How is the social field being constituted by each tendency? Do the objects of investigation in each one bear any relation to those of the others? Are they in contradiction or can they somehow be collected together as a general history? These questions are only the beginning of a theoretical examination of social history that is much needed today. The virtue of the recent writings of Foucault is that by their very difference from social history they raise the important theoretical questions in the most forceful way.
The flow of Foucault's texts, the way one thing is put after another, disturbs the expectations of the reader familiar with social history. There appear to be huge gaps in the narrative, silences that scream at the reader. Topics are annoyingly placed out of the normal order, disrupting one's sense of logical sequence. Levels of analysis are mixed together in irritating confusion: the difference between ideas and behavior goes unrecognized and is violated. Simple questions of causality are ignored or appear in reverse order. The writing is thick and metaphoric and the point of view of the narrative line is often lost. The object of investigation is never quite clarified and appears to be neither individuals, nor groups, nor institutions. What is worse, things seem to shift in the course of the writing; at the beginning one issue is at stake, by the end we seem to be reading about something else. Worst of all, the author's attitude toward the topic of study
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never emerges clearly. He seems to take a perverse pleasure in shifting his stance, or simply in adopting provocatively an unorthodox attitude toward a topic. Finally, while much research has contributed to Foucault's studies, a great deal of material has not been looked at. The evidential basis of the texts is odd and incomplete. No wonder historians are skeptical about the value of his efforts.
Although Foucault's work is read by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, literary critics, and historians, the basic impact of his work is historical. Foucault offers a new way of thinking about history, writing history, and deploying history in current political struggles. If Foucault is the enfant terrible who would destroy the human sciences, he is also one of their most fascinating practitioners, reshaping their contours according to an original if most peculiar historical practice. Foucault is an anti-historical historian, one who in writing history, threatens every canon of the craft. One can ask, therefore, if there is a theory of history in Foucault's texts. Can one discover, against the grain of Foucault's anti-systematic writing, a set of concepts or categories that reveals the basis of his powerful and shocking accomplishments?
A reading of Foucault's major writings might lead one to conclude that Foucault has not developed anything like a theory of history. He has written no Toynbeean study of the past encompassing the last few millennia in a schema of categories. He has written no theory of causation to argue that one factor or set of factors directs human destiny. He has written no teleological tract to prove that the meaning and future of mankind will be realized in a given manner. Moreover, practicing historians in. the English-speaking world for the most part will not even grant that Foucault is one of their own. Many American and British historians have received Foucault's books not as the development of a new theory of history and not even as the work of an empirical historian, but rather as an attack on the discipline of history. One
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historian notes in passing Foucault's extreme 'dismissal of the intrinsic value of the discipline of history'.2 Another historian, writing in the prestigious Journal of Modern History, spends fifty pages warning historians of the dangers of Foucault's writing for their craft.3 By what right then can one speak of Foucault's theory of history?
It must be recalled that Foucault held a chair in history (History of the Systems of Thought) at the Collège de France until his untimely and tragic death. It must also be mentioned that Foucault has written a half dozen books that concern aspects of the European past. Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), and The History of Sexuality (1976) are all at least superficially works of history. How can it be that someone who has studied the past so productively is not granted the title historian?
THE THESIS OF DISCONTINUITY
The answer, it would appear, is clear: Foucault does not narrate the evolution of the past; he does not tell the story of how 'the seamless web of yesteryear' leads slowly and inexorably into the present. In short, Foucault is not an historian of continuity but of discontinuity. Foucault attempts to show how the past was different, strange, threatening. He labors to distance the past from the present, to disrupt the easy, cozy intimacy that historians have traditionally enjoyed in the relationship of the past to the present. He strives to alter the position of the historian from one who gives support to the present by collecting all the meanings of the past and tracing the line of inevitability through which they are resolved in the present, to one who breaks off the past from the present and, by demonstrating the foreignness of the past, relativizes and undercuts the legitimacy of the present. And Foucault does this bluntly, even abrasively, as in this example
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where he chides intellectual historians for their obsession with the filiation of ideas, a variation of the continuity thesis:
... to seek in this great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles 'in advance' a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port-Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.4
The maturation of the historian thus requires the acquisition of the taste for the past as a penchant for what is different. Foucault unmasks the epistemological innocence of the historian. He raises the discomforting question: What does the historian do to the past when he or she traces its continuity and assigns it its causes? For Foucault, history is a form of knowledge and a form of power at the same time; put differently, it is a means of controlling and domesticating the past in the form of knowing it. The historian pretends to recreate the past, in Ranke's phrase, as it really was. Using an awkward combination of anecdote and statistic, the historian paints the landscape of the past in the colors of the present. He or she explains the present by the past, claiming the disclosure of the truth or a truth about both. The historian accomplishes this goal without placing himself or herself in question. Instead, the historian's work is motivated by the sheer force of truth, the quest for knowledge.
Let us not misunderstand what is at stake. Foucault's critique is not based on the opposition of objectivity and relativity, of science and ideology. His position may sound similar to the attack on value neutrality, but something else is in question. It would not help, for example, if the historian were to acknowledge openly his values: love of country, party advocacy, or the like. Foucault's critique is more basic
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than this. Whether one writes history under the guise of objectivity, or for the explicit purpose of an ideological cause, is not the heart of the matter. Instead, what is at issue is the act of an individual claiming to contain within his or her consciousness a certain truth about the past and representing it in writing. Foucault does not claim that such an effort is impossible or illegitimate, but that this operation is an active, willful working on materials. It is a creation, a fiction, in the full sense of the term, one which, as it has been practiced by positivists, liberals, and Marxists alike, produces a discourse with a set of meanings that acts upon everyone who comes into contact with it. Historical writing, Foucault contends, is a practice that has effects, and these effects tend, whatever one's political party, to erase the difference of the past and justify a certain version of the present. And finally, the practice of the discourse of the past places the historian in a privileged position: as the one who knows the past, the historian has power. The historian becomes an intellectual who presides over the past, nurtures it, develops it, and controls it. Since, under the thesis of continuity, the historian is able to collect within himself or herself the experience of the past, he or she has an ideological interest in maintaining its importance, reasserting the inevitability with which the past leads to the present, while at the same time denying that there is a certain power at stake. Foucault writes:
Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject - in the form of historical consciousness - will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode.5
In this way history, as presently practiced, enacts an Hegelian totalization of the past and the present.
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Foucault's critique of the epistemology of historical practice is clarified and reveals its importance when it is brought to bear on those historical schools that present themselves consciously as advocates of progress. When the relationship is made explicit between the writing of history and the movement of liberation in the present, the force of Foucault's thesis of discontinuity becomes apparent and appears most appropriate. The Marxist school of historiography is the most fruitful example. According to the tenets of historical materialism, there is a direct relationship between theory and historical writing on the one hand and the movement for social emancipation on the other. The investigation of class conflicts under the aegis of the theory of the mode of production is a guide for the conduct of the struggle in the present. History, for Marxists, is written neither for amusement nor for self-cultivation. One writes history in order to promote revolution. Class struggles of the past, however diverse their characters, are gathered by these historians and confirm the movement of social liberation in the present. Hence the continuity of the past and the present is maintained. The Marxist historian is no mere curator of a museum of forgotten struggles but, by virtue of his or her knowledge, a privileged participant in the present situation of revolt. The theoretically informed historian knows more than the workers about the strategy for change. Marxism thereby sanctions a certain type of intellectual to represent the workers in the task of revolution. Leninism finds its support in historical materialism, receiving power over the workers by dint of the intellectuals' ability to know the past and therefore the present. The truth of the movement for social transformation is removed from the hands of the workers and transferred into the minds of the intellectuals. History has been abused, according to the Foucauldian thesis, as the doctrine of continuity has allowed the struggle of the workers to be appropriated by the intellectuals.
The intention of this argument is not to single out Marxists
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and condemn their errors, as anti-Communist cold warriors might suppose. The same analysis could be given of liberal historians, positivists, and even that most recalcitrant of all groups, empiricists. In fact, since empiricists still dominate historical writing in the United States and Britain, they are the ones most in need of critical examination. Nevertheless, I will explore Foucault's theory of history further by continuing to interrogate Marxism, because that school of historiography is, I believe, the most important and because Foucault himself, situated in France, is concerned most directly with it.
KNOWLEDGE/POWER
In the 1970s Foucault produced two books, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, which initiated something of a new departure from. his earlier writings and developed significantly his theory of history. In the books on prisons and sexuality, his aim is to explore a configuration of knowledge and power, or a set of configurations, that have become increasingly characteristic of twentieth-century European and American society. He argues that knowledge and power are deeply connected and that their configuration constitutes an imposing presence over advanced industrial society, extending to the most intimate recesses of everyday life. The form of domination characteristic of advanced capitalism is not exploitation, not alienation, not psychic repression, not anomie, not dysfunctional behavior. It is instead an new pattern of social control that is embedded in practice at many points in the social field and that constitutes a set of structures whose agency is at once everyone and no one.
In the last chapter I analyzed Marx's concept of labor, pointing out its theoretical limitations. At this point I will restate some of those objections, placing them in the context
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of Foucault's critique of the subject and indicating why they appear, from Foucault's perspective, similar to liberal assumptions about history. I will then show how the concept knowledge/power, Foucault's alternative to the category of the laboring subject, is able to illuminate the historical field in a promising manner. I will then go on to discuss the Western Marxist categories of ideology and repression. From a Foucauldian perspective, these ideas are also flawed in their application to historical discourse. According to Foucault and several radical theorists who present an associated line of argumentation (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard), Marx's concept of labor is flawed by its reliance on aspects of liberal theory which it seeks to transcend. The concept of labor as developed by Marxists and liberals alike constitutes the social world as the product of a collective subject, the work force. Marxists then show how the products of labor are stolen from the worker-subject by the mechanisms, of exploitation and alienation. For liberals, the worker receives a just wage, determined by the market, so that domination is eliminated. In both cases, however, the question of historical -- social analysis centers on the subject. For liberals, the drama reaches its crisis when the contract is made: two subjects, acting rationally, agree to mutual obligations. For Marxists, the script is varied at one level and the same at another: worker-subjects act upon matter, creating things that circulate through the channels of the social world. But even here we have the somewhat theological drama of active subjects shaping matter into desired forms. In both cases the social-historical field is available for analysis from the point of view of subjects.
For Foucault, these analyses are inadequate and Marxism cannot be the basis for a critical theory of history, because the modes of domination in the twentieth century cannot be perceived from the limited vantage point of the subject. Instead, domination today takes the form of a combination or
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structure of knowledge and power which is not external to the subject, but still unintelligible from his or her perspective. Critical theory cannot present history as the transition from abusive aristocrats to exploiting capitalists, because domination is no longer centered in or caused by subjects. The result is that the labor process, as theorized by Marx, does not make intelligible sources of radicalism that are adequate to over-turning current modes of domination.
The point is not that the labor process is free of oppression or of the prevailing 'technologies of power'. It is rather that the shift to the new critical concepts is carried out better by reference to other social practices - in part because Marxism has colonized the category of labor, in part because the dominant structures have developed elsewhere. In the practices of punishment and sexuality, in the social locations of the family, the military, and the asylum, Foucault uncovered the birth and development of new modes of domination, combinations of discourses and practices that constituted new forms of subjugation. This process also affected labor practices under capitalism but not in the way Marx conceived it. The discipline of the factory must not be equated with the mechanisms of exploitation and alienation.
In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Foucault divides the histories of crime and sex into two or three main periods, with the eighteenth century serving as one of the dividing lines. In the earlier periods, knowledge and power about crime focused on the body of the transgressor. In the exemplary but not representative case of the regicide Damiens, 'technologies of power' were exercised to extract the 'truth' of the crime by a complex of secret torture and public punishment. Damiens's body became the target of the knowledge/power of the judicial apparatus of the Old Regime. His brutal public execution was the final ritual through which the pre-modern system of punishment was fulfilled.6
Before the Counter Reformation knowledge/power over
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sexuality also concerned the body, its acts, and its transgressions.7 In this case, the discourse about sexuality was governed by clerical, not secular authorities. The confessional was the place where sexual acts were examined, discussed, and evaluated. Questions were aimed at determining what was done, by whom, in what positions, and how many times. A fixed schedule of penance was elaborated over time to regulate atonement for violations of the rules. In the pre-modern period, then, knowledge/power created and shaped practices of criminality and sexuality through manipulations of the body, rearranging it when necessary to produce and reproduce the social order. The full impact of Foucault's analyses of these technologies of power requires a careful reading of his texts. But the rough outlines of his discoveries should be clear even from this brief account.
The early modem period is separated from the nineteenth century and its unique structure of knowledge/power by a dramatic discontinuity. In the more recent period, discourses about sexuality and technologies of power over crime change dramatically. Crime and sex become subjects of new disciplinary authorities that enact an extraordinary 'microphysics of power', extending throughout the social landscape. Regarding crime, Bentham's Panopticon becomes one of the sources for a new prison system; and for sexuality, Freud's theory of repression eventually comes to govern the life of the family.8 In both cases new regimes are established in which convicted criminals and sexual activity (especially of children) are scrupulously monitored. The object of control has shifted from the body to the mind, and the methods of control have been extensively articulated as the effects of the technologies of power constitute new types of subordinated groups. Elaborate bureaucracies are established to keep tabs on people; extensive files are developed with an enormous expansion of disciplines and scientific experimentation to study, examine, and probe the most banal thoughts and actions of potential criminals and recidivists, childhood masturbators and hysterical
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women. The elaboration of institutionalized discourses and powers is endless. Eventually, the population can be put under surveillance and observed almost continuously, like an amoeba under a microscope. Although not every social institution adopted the model of the Panopticon, its dissemination, as described by Foucault, was awesome:
there was a whole series of mechanisms that did not adopt the compact' prison model, but used some of the carceral methods: charitable societies, moral improvement associations, organizations that handed out assistance and also practiced surveillance, workers' estates and lodging houses. . . And, lastly, this great carceral network reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society. 9
In the instances of crime and sex studied by Foucault, the exercise of knowledge/power cannot be comprehended under the sign of repression. Sex was not repressed in the nineteenth century, as Freudo-Marxists would have us believe.10 That is not the way technologies of power operate. On the contrary, Foucault points out that discourses on sex flourished in the nineteenth century as never before. If overt sexuality passed under a ban in polite society of the Victorian era, that is only because it had become more, not less, of a preoccupation. In bourgeois families, parents studied the new medical literature on child rearing which warned them. of the dangers of masturbation. A combined operation both denied childhood sexuality and marshaled parents' energies against it. Sexuality was elicited from children and then subjected to extensive rules to prevent its overt manifestation. Similarly, the classic hysterical. woman was considered to contain a bundle of sexually contradictory impulses and, at the same time, was idealized as a vessel of purity and innocence. In these instances, there was not an activity which was 'repressed', but an extensive development of knowledge/power which shaped, constituted, and controlled practices according
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to complex rules. Hand in hand, technologies of power and discourses are, according to Foucault, positive, creative forces, not negative, preventive measures.
If this is so, how can one explain the widespread belief, one not limited to the Freudo-Marxists, that power is something that denies, forestalls, represses, prevents? In one of his numerous interviews, Foucault provides a highly suggestive hypothesis to account for the view that power is negative.10 The Western system of law, he argues, was developed in the context of the monarchical system. As the kings established themselves as centers of power, they were opposed successively and at times concurrently by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The nobility sought to regain rights and liberties which the monarch denied them, as in the Magna Carta, and the bourgeoisie generated a system of law which aimed at curtailing, limiting, and preventing actions of the monarch which were injurious to the instauration of a market economy. The monarch prevented private feuds among aristocrats and bourgeois law abolished the arbitrary abuses of kingship. In both cases what was at stake was a conception of power as negative or repressive. Over the centuries, the practices and discourses concerning power have thought of it only in this way. Since power is actually positive, the view that it is negative functions as an ideology masking its actual nature.
THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY
Just as the concept of repression deriving from the Freudian tradition is inadequate as a guide to the workings of power, so the concept of ideology in the Marxist tradition fails to provide a theoretical compass to the historical manifestations of knowledge and discourse. Before examining Foucault's critique of the concept of ideology, I must explain its importance to the continuing vitality of Marxist theory. In the twentieth century, Marxist theorists in Italy, France, and
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Germany have turned increasingly to the concept of ideology to account for various phenomena of advanced capitalism. Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser have all resorted to the notion of ideology to explain, within a Marxist framework, important cultural transformations that have apparently delayed the progress of proletarian revolution. The role of nationalism in defusing class conflict in times of war, the role of race in dividing the working class, the role of consumerism in purchasing workers' allegiance to capitalism, the role of the educational system and the media in transforming contradiction into consent, the role of the family in providing an escape from the battle over the means of production - all these have insured that the ideas of the ruling class shall remain the ruling ideas. ''The concept of ideology thus occupies a crucial position in the apparatus of Marxism, explaining how class consciousness slips continuously into false consciousness. If the concept of ideology is undermined and found wanting, Marxists might be hard put to present a coherent account of the relative absence of class struggle in the advanced societies.
Foucault presents the following critique of the concept of ideology:
The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to use for three reasons. The first is that, whether one wants it to be or not, it is always in virtual opposition to something like the truth. Now I believe that the problem is not to make the division between that which, in a discourse, falls under scientificity and truth and that which falls under something else, but to see historically how truth-effects are produced inside discourses which are not in themselves either true or false. The second inconvenience is that it refers, necessarily I believe, to something like a subject. Thirdly, ideology is in a secondary position in relation to something which must function as the infrastructure or economic or material determinant for it. For these three reasons, I believe that it is a notion that one cannot use without precautions. 12
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Foucault's first objection to the concept of ideology addresses the binary opposition of science/ideology that holds a prominent place in Marxist thought, especially Althusser's.13 Ideology is conceived here as a form of mystification that does not attain the status of knowledge or science. To study ideology is thus to study ideas that have been distorted through contamination with some aspect of relations based on domination, as in Habermas' notion of the ideal speech situation.14 From Foucault's Nietzschean perspective, however, all discourses are merely perspectives, and if one has more value than another that is not because of its intrinsic properties as 'truth', or because we call it 'science', but because of an extra-epistemological ground, the role the discourse plays in constituting practices. By designating itself 'science', Marxism gives itself a false and easy legitimacy, one that enables the Marxist theorist to place himself or herself above the masses as the bearer of the universal. As a science, Marxism becomes just one more discourse that functions to generate a subjugated practice. Thus Foucault contends that the concept of ideology is but one more example of the way reason comes to dominate the very object it intends to liberate: man.
Foucault's second objection to the concept of ideology derives from his anti-humanism. The notion of ideology places the source of 'ideas' in subjects, such as the ruling class which, as the phrase from Marx goes, expresses the ruling ideas of every age. The reference back to the subject prevents one from examining ideas in the manner preferred by Foucault, as discourses whose intelligibility does not derive from subjects. Foucault's anti-subjectivism is one of the guiding threads in his writings, which on other issues changed considerably from the 1960s to the 1970s. This tendency, it must be acknowledged, derives from the structuralist view of language as a decentered totality. Language for the structuralists is not a tool for the expression of the subject's ideas but a system of relations between signs which constitute its object
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as the subject is Foucault has consistently denied allegiance to structuralism,15 which is accurate since he is not a formalist, pursuing a universal combinatory in the manner of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Foucault's animus against the subject is motivated by his project to analyze the mechanisms of the human sciences. The disciplines which take 'man' as their object also have 'man' as their 'subject'. This hermeneutic circle produces a certain blindness which allows the human sciences to avoid reflecting upon their effects on practice. Foucault thinks that, by taking a point of view other than that of the subject, one can decipher the mechanisms through which the human sciences come to dominate, not liberate, the subject. His effort to develop the concept of discourse is motivated by this, intention. Thus he defines discourse in opposition to the subject as follows:
I shall abandon any attempt ... to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression - the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various, positions of subjectivity. Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing. speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject, and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. 16
Such a non-subjectivist concept of discourse invalidates the Marxist notion of ideology in its complicity with expressivist assumptions. The concept of ideology is inadequate for decoding the dimensions of domination inherent in the human sciences, disciplines which are ubiquitous today.
The third objection to the concept of ideology, that ideas are reducible to the mode of production, is found in Foucault's insistence upon the immanent relation of knowledge and power. Perhaps more than Marx, Foucault lays the basis
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for a materialist history of knowledge, since he conceives of ideas in such close proximity to practice. Discourses, for Foucault, are already powers and do not need to find their material force somewhere else, as in the mode of production. Most significantly for a critical theory of history, such a perspective shifts the focus of attention away from the sublime ideas of the intellectual elite and toward the mundane discourses of disciplinary institutions that more directly affect the everyday life of the masses. Ideology is no longer seen as the airy dialogue of great minds, but as the prosaic encounter of criminal and criminologist, neurotic and therapist, child and parent, unemployed worker and welfare agency.
Foucault is therefore opposed to a central doctrine of historical materialism upon which the concept of ideology rests: the distinction between the base and the superstructure. To the extent that Marxism depends upon this distinction, it can no longer serve as the primary basis for radical theory. Some Marxists defend their position by resorting to a concept of mediations, developed most extensively by Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason. The notion of base/superstructure, these Marxists contend,17 is a relic of the Second and Third Internationals, no longer to be taken seriously by Marxists. Contemporary Marxists account for so-called superstructural levels, recognizing the mutual impact of base and super-structure. The old economic determinism of the 1920s and 1930s is dead. Marx and Engels themselves, it can be pointed out, denied such reductionism and warned their followers against it. While it can be admitted that the notion of mediations is an improvement over reductionism, it must also be noted that the improvement does not go far enough. The perspective of the reciprocal relations of base and super-structure is still unable to account for the internal complexity of any aspect of the 'superstructure' and remains tied to a totalizing impulse that Foucault finds problematic.
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A MULTIPLICITY OF FORCES
Instead of refurbishing Marxism with a more complex method of totalization, Foucault proposes a multiplicity of forces in any social formation, a multiplicity which is dispersed, discontinuous, and unsynchronized. Social theory for him cannot grasp an entire social formation in one key concept or schema. It must rather explore each discourse/practice separately, unpacking its layers, decoding its meanings, tracing its development wherever its meandering path may lead. Foucault is an ardent detotalizer, preferring a syncopated approach which never pretends to capture the whole of a historical moment. He goes so far in this direction as to acknowledge, in some places, a penchant for pluralism.18 In good part because Marxism (as well as liberalism) has so inured us to the habit of totalizing, the urgent need today is for shattering those great generalities -the rise of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of democracy, the class, struggle, the capitalist mode of production - which for so long have dominated historical thinking. Foucault asks, What is the fear that leads to such hasty totalization? In place of 'global history' he would put 'general history', in which the aim would be to 'describe the peculiarity of practices, the play of their relations, the form of their dependencies'. 19
In this spirit the emphasis in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality is on the multiplicity and dispersion of knowledge and power, an emphasis which enacts a shift from the earlier notion of the epistème. In The Order of Things, for example, the epistème functioned as the master key to all discourses, even if Foucault did not intend it as such, and history was a succession of epistèmes. Each age had its unique epistème which was the ground of all utterances. The epistème operated as a totalizing concept which rendered Foucault defenseless against the common attack that he could not explain the change from one epistème to another.
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The substitution of the idea of a multiplicity of discourses/practices for the epistème allows Foucault to escape from the problems of causation and change. Now Foucault can. deal with the birth of prisons by incorporating the notion of discontinuity into a properly historical analysis, one that can follow changes where they occur and still put the stress on discontinuity. He can show first how the Panopticon system breaks drastically with the past and second how it incorporates aspects of earlier disciplinary modes, such as the technology of power developed in the military to regiment large bodies of men and later transferred to the prison system. There can, in. a Foucauldian analysis, be specific causes for specific changes; and continuities of particular types without losing the main argument that discontinuity is the central focus of historical research.
Foucault's recent writings also avoid the charge of a historical structuralism by incorporating notions of archeology and genealogy. Although these concepts remain somewhat unclear and imprecise in Foucault's texts, they do initiate a shift to an. historical problematic that promises to strengthen his position vis-à-vis Marxism and traditional historiography. At the most general level, archeology and genealogy are morphological strategies, searching out the changing structure of diverse phenomena. Foucault uses the term archeology to denote a level of the analysis of discourses which grasps their "rules of formation" without reference to the subject.21 The term genealogy implies the political function in which history is 'the reversal of a relationship of forces'.22 The historian can undermine the present order by reversing its images of the past. The method advocated by Foucault requires the historian to go back in time until a difference is located, such as the torture of Damiens, the pre-Tridentine confessional, the medieval ship of fools. These alien discourses/practices are then explored in such a way that their negativity in relation to the present explodes the 'rationality' of phenomena that are taken for granted. When the technology of power
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of the past is elaborated in detail, present-day assumptions which posit the past as 'irrational', are undermined.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO MARX
This chapter has discussed the broad outlines of Foucault's recipe for writing history. In the subsequent chapters I will examine in more detail two of his texts. Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Before going on to those analyses I want to pause in order to clarify an especially difficult problem, i.e., the precise relationship of the theories of Foucault and Marx. It is tempting to maintain that Foucault simply replaces Marx as the master theorist of history. Some readers might in fact come to that conclusion if they were convinced by the above discussion. Yet that it not my intention, nor is it my judgement. Foucault's discourse analysis, whatever its merits, cannot replace class analysis or even liberal analyses of political and intellectual events. The issues fall at two distinct levels which require separate judgements about the impact of Foucault's work: (1) the general level of an historical framework and (2) the level of particular, monographic historiography.
Foucault's work is most threatening to Marxism at the general level. As a totalizing framework that encompasses all history in an evolutionary scheme and relates all levels of society under the dominance of the mode of production, Marxism cannot be sustained. The limitations of this kind of totalizing thought have already been discussed and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that Foucault's case is strongest in arguing for detotalizing historical theory. His critique of the subject is sustained both at the level of the object of historical investigation (the laboring subject in Marx) and the authorial subject who writes history. To repeat, the point of view of any particular subject (proletariat, democratizing
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political, rational individual) is an inadequate basis for a totalization of the social field. At the same time the writer of an historical text employs a theoretical framework which is always partial, always limited in the field that it illuminates and therefore can never serve as an exclusive, all-encompassing foundation for historical theory. Since knowledge is always tied to power, the special position of the author of an historical text must always limit the scope of his or her claim to truth.
Once the pretensions of Marxism to serve as a totalizing historical theory are put to rest, it is then possible to assess the value of class analysis for particular historical objects. At this level Foucault's position does not at all exclude Marxist historical analysis. At this level the relative merits of Foucault's genealogy, Marxist class analysis and Whig history to illuminate the social-historical field need to be assessed in each particular case. At this level of the conflict of interpretive schemes, the merits of Foucault's position can be judged on the basis of how one envisages the needs of the present situation. If one is convinced that open public debate and parliamentary democracy are the fundamental requirements of the present situation, then Habermas' evolutionary linguistics or liberal political analysis provides the key indices of historical analysis. If one is convinced that the struggles of the working class are the center of the contemporary drama, then the Marxist position receives priority for historical work. If one is convinced that a new social formation is emerging in the advanced societies (the mode of information) in which knowledge is increasingly implicated in modes of domination and in which protest has shifted its focus away from the process of production, then Foucault's schema is the urgent item on the historiographical agenda. In any case, however, each position will be able to illuminate certain aspects of the historical field and the merits of each position vis-à-vis the others are relative not absolute.
With these cautions in mind it becomes apparent that in
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the discussion in this chapter I have emphasized the differences between Marxist historical writing and that of Foucault. I have done this simply to clarify Foucault's position and also because this chapter remains at the general level of theoretical formation. In the chapters that follow the issues become more specific, the histories of prisons and sexuality. In these contexts also the merits of the positions of Foucault and Marx are subject to relative not absolute judgements.
NOTES
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1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 109-33. This piece also appears in 'Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy', Working Papers (1979), pp. 29-48.
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Foucault's presentism, see Michael Roth, Foucault's History of the Present', History and Theory, No. 20 (1981), pp. 32-46. Also of interest is the special issue on Foucault of Humanities in Society, No. 3 (Winter, 1980), with contributions by Michael Sprinker, Paul Bové, Karlis Racevskis, and Jonathan Arac.