6
Foucault and the Mode of Information: An Assessment
Foucault offers historians a new framework for studying the past (knowledge/power), a new set of methods for doing so (archeology and genealogy), and a new notion of temporality (discontinuity). Suggestive as it is, this theory of history is burdened with several difficulties.
One objection often raised to Foucault's writing is that it is difficult, mannered, and finally incomprehensible. Empiricists and Marxists, this, position maintains, at least have the virtue of readability. Such an objection would raise serious questions if it could be shown that Foucault's obscurity derives from a fuzziness or confusion of thought. I would argue that the difficulty can be explained instead by the novelty of Foucault's theory of history, by his anti-evolutionist, anti-subjectivist strategies which go deeply against the grain of practitioners, of the human sciences.1
A more serious charge concerns the unsatisfying incompleteness of Foucault's position. In order to avoid the problems of Marxism and empiricism, Foucault refused to totalize his position, refuses to present a neat and closed theory of history, a formula that would explain the past. He doggedly takes each question separately, exploring its details and specificities, acknowledging that there are gaps in history, unmapped continents of experience. He does not try in all cases to show connections between diverse phenomena,
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explain ideas by reference to the economy, a revolution by a fiscal crisis or a war. In the book on prisons he traces the new technologies of power associated with its birth but does not mention how specific events shaped that birth, nor how the new panoptic prison system was diffused in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The syncopated, uneven character of his books rubs unpleasantly against the sensibilities of those expecting a text that resolves all the main questions.
There is indeed a difficulty with Foucault's method of procedure. Without a systematic theory Foucault cannot explain why he does not explore questions he has omitted from his text. He permits himself to trace the changing forms of power/knowledge without, for example, discussing the response of victims of this process. He does not ask, in Discipline and Punish, how the prisoners reacted to the disciplinary constraints of Panopticisin. He describes minutely the efficiency and thoroughness of the prison system, its complete control over the individual, its relentless supervision of the least detail of activity. He then reveals that the Panopticon, judged by its intention of reform and normalization of the prison population, has been a scandalous failure. Recidivism rates have always been high. But without an account of the response of the prisoners to the system, the 'failure' of the system sits in his text like an uninvited guest.
Foucault does argue that this 'hypocrisy' of the prison system is only a ruse, that the technology of power it establishes is its only real purpose, and that propaganda about the reform of criminals is merely an ideological decoy. Nevertheless, in interviews beginning in 1977, he does begin to acknowledge the importance of resistance to structures.2 He admits that history must delineate not only the colonization of everyday life by knowledge/power but the countless revolts that accompany it.3 Does this mean that Foucault is shifting to a dialectical approach? Further, can one discuss
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resistance without resorting to traditional notions of the subject and freedom? In short, how can one develop a theory of resistance without falling back into the problems that plague the Marxist ideas of class consciousness and the proletariat as revolutionary agent? Suffice it is to say that much work remains to be done before this difficult issue can be properly addressed.
Moreover, Foucault's unsystematic discourse leads to problems at the epistemological level of the formation of concepts. Like Nietzsche, Foucault introduces his categories in. the midst of his text, without a full elaboration or a systematic presentation. For example, the concept of 'the technology of power', a central theme of Discipline of Punish, appears first on page 23 with no explanation whatsoever. Foucault is there discussing the 'four general rules' of the book. The third rule reads as follows:
3. Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according to one's point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of 'epistemological-juridical' formation: in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man. 4
In this off-hand manner Foucault specifies the object of his study as 'the technology of power' of the prison systems from the Old Regime to the present. But what does it mean to say that one will 'make the technology of power' the principle of both the institution of the- prison and the social science that studies it? Foucault employs the term 'technology of power' dozens of times in the book; he also uses other terms as if they were synonyms ('micro-physics of power', 'mechanisms of power' and so forth). At issue is not
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the game of finding all the meanings of the term 'technology of power' in order to show a contradiction in Foucault's thought or simply to refine a formal definition of the term. The difficulty lies elsewhere: without a clearly enunciated systematic theory the limits of Foucault's project remain uncertain. It is impossible to indicate the parameters of the phenomenon of the technology of power, for instance, without a systematic elaboration of its conceptual basis. By the end of the book, the reader may have a pretty good notion of what Foucault means by the technology of power, but it will be very difficult indeed to determine if the category is compatible with other theories, such as Marxism, or if it can be the basis of studies of other institutional matrices. In fact, Foucault's tendency to totalize the concept 'technology of power', going against the grain of his general position, can be attributed to his failure adequately to theorize it.
Foucault's theoretical diffidence is the consequence of his standpoint on the human sciences. He adamantly rejects the traditional strategy of theoretical development and empirical verification that is practiced by liberal positivists and Marxists alike. In the German Ideology Marx insisted that the value of the theory of the mode of production could be determined only by empirical studies.5 What Foucault finds objectionable in standard social science is the unacknowledged implication of the claim of knowledge, that is, the will to power. Like the Frankfurt School's critique of humanism in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment and, of course, like Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil,6 Foucault argues that systematic social science, especially careful theoretical elaboration, contains within itself an element of domination of a technology of power. As was stated in the passage above where the term 'technology of power' was introduced, the discourse of criminology is itself a form of power. Technologies of power consist of knowledge and practice intimately associated in the creation of social relations
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based on domination. Because social science is not neutral, above the fray of class struggles, the rational exercise of theoretical production is implicated in the problem of domination. And Marxism, with its oppressive state systems and hierarchical political parties is not different in principle form the behavioral sciences and policy sciences of capitalism. Even if the theorist explicitly takes the side of the oppressed rather than hiding behind the mask of scientific neutrality, the function of domination associated with systematic theory is not eliminated.
In Discipline and Punish Foucault is by and large consistent in his theoretical asceticism. Many readers find the book frustrating and difficult because at the same time that the case is made against modern prison systems, nothing is offered by the author as a response to it. Students of the book find in it an impression of deep despair7 created by the convincing genealogy of prisons without the utopian alternative that systematic theory provides. If the concept of the technology of power were fully elaborated at some point, a political stance of refusal would have to emerge. Forms of resistance to the technology of power, so underplayed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (see his acknowledgement of this problem in Knowledge/Power), are a necessary concomitant of a standard theory.8 Marx theorized a proletarian revolt against capitalism. and liberals theorized resistance to monarchical despotism. But if such a theoretical turn were taken, Foucault contends, the concept of technology of power would return to the theorist and become an emanation of the reason of the author, Foucault himself. The author of the theory would be the commander of a new movement and would exercise domination over its followers. The intellectual would take his place at the head of the revolutionary column; his mind would be venerated by the oppressed as a source of power and they would be subject to oppression by him. Once again the scenario of the Western philosophical tradition would be enacted as Hegel's
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deity of reason would confirm its dialectical power of immanence. Foucault's refusal of systematic theory is thus similar to Nietzsche's suspicion of reason as the center of being. And he gives up much to maintain that stance. He insists that his books are only tools for the revolutionary deconstruction of the established apparatus.9 Or he would have us to think of them as bombs for others to throw at the halls of power and wealth. The only systematic principle for this anti-systematic writer is his denial of system, denial of reason, and consequently denial of authorship. 10 Yet even if one sympathizes with Foucault's predicament, the position he is in remains a predicament, one fraught with difficulties. 11
In addition to the refusal to systematize his position, there is another side to Foucault's theoretical timidity, one that also raises doubts and causes concern. Foucault is an historian of discourse above all else. He argues for the power effects of knowledge rather than its truth value. He is acutely aware of the way discourse shapes practice, the way knowledge is a material force in history. Yet he declines to differentiate his own discourse from that of others. He argues brilliantly that psychoanalysis, for example, is a discourse on sexuality that takes control of it and produces it in new forms. He urges us to rid ourselves of such 'true discourses' on sexuality, but he does not provide a theoretical basis for distinguishing between discourses that lead to domination and those that pave the way for liberation. He never mediates on the power effect of his own discourse or provides criteria by which one can distinguish its conservative and radical modes.
Foucault attempts to defend himself against charges of inadequate epistemological self-reflection by maintaining that writers never attain an understanding of the assumptions that inform their work. 'It is not possible', Foucault wrote in The Archeology of Know1edge, 'for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that
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we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say ... its modes of appearance.'12 Both The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge argue with great persuasiveness that the rules of formation of any discourse are beneath the writer's awareness. Surely then Foucault himself cannot be asked to do what he has demonstrated others could not do. Although there is much to be said for this argument, it is finally not convincing because it speaks only to the textual level itself, the text as a system of signifiers, leaving aside the question of the text as practice, of discourse as truth effects. When the connection is made between knowledge and power, discourse and practice, as Foucault began to do in the works that followed The Archeology of Knowledge, the epistemological question shifts its ground and becomes available for self-reflection, at least partially. If pure epistemology - the principles of apodicticity - is a false question, the power of truth is not, and one must be prepared to explore the way one's own discourse enters the world and disturbs it.
Discipline and Punish cannot escape its fate as a form of communication. However much Foucault would hide from his text, withdraw his rational authorship, and however sound his reasons for doing so, his text remains itself a discourse and as a discourse it retains its power-effects. To deny them is not to make them disappear. Foucault's confusion is therefore to think that his awareness of the limits of reason and systematic theory can result in a form of theory immune from those limits. In short, Foucault betrays an idealist assumption that an author's awareness of the dilemmas of authorship sanctions a stance of non-authorship. In other words, that Foucault himself, in his writing, can elude the technology of power of writing. But it is clear that if the domination inherent in reason and authorship can be muted, that would occur not through an author's awareness but through a change in the social system, a new set of practices in which the audience and the system of publishing no longer
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conferred power on the author, a situation that has never existed and may never exist. For these reasons the discourse of the technology of power must be considered badly incomplete and therefore open to abuse. Thus at both ends of the theoretical spectrum there are unresolved problems: Foucault neither theorizes systematically the field of history nor examines epistemologically the basis of his thought.
Foucault defends himself against charges of inadequate systematization of theory by challenging the traditional notion of the intellectual. At least since the Enlightenment, Western culture has supported the intellectual as the defender of natural rights, the advocate of humanity, the representative of the universal. Foucault rightly names Voltaire as the typical case. The intellectual was the advance guard of progress and revolution, the solvent of traditional beliefs and entrenched authority. So accepted was this view of the intellectual that the ultraconservative Joseph de Maistre could attribute the fall of the Old Regime to two of them: Voltaire and Rousseau. In the twentieth century the position of the intellectual has been questioned provocatively by Julien Benda, Antonio Gramsci, and others - Benda accusing them of cultural treason, Gramsci distinguishing traditional and organic types. Yet Foucault has little difficulty placing Marx in the line of the Enlightenment philosophe. Did he not locate the universal interest of man in the cause of the working class, ignoring completely the interests of women, children, and the non-European world? Did he not arrogate to himself the position of science and the ability to discriminate between the true and false consciousness of laboring men? These are irrefutable signs that Marx was an intellectual of the classic type.
Foucault terms that personage a 'general' intellectual and distinguishes him. from a 'specific' intellectual. The specific intellectual is a creature of the twentieth century with its fragmentation of knowledge, its multiplication of disciplines, its infinite expansion of research centers, its explosion of
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the printed word, its professionalization of discourse. Today anyone who claims to speak for the universal interests of man appears arrogant or naive, utopian or mad. Marxists especially have bemoaned the splintering of knowledge and the loss of stature of the intellectual. They have not overlooked the conservative implications of the rampant professionalism in the social sciences. When fields of knowledge splinter into fragments, no one has the stature to speak for the interests of society as a whole, to criticize the system, or to represent the universal. There is no secret about who benefits from this development. The ruling class discredits its gadflies as cranks who do not have enough information to evaluate the situation. The shift from intellectual to expert, from social critic to sociological specialist, undercuts the task of radical theory. Or so the Marxists think.
Foucault finds a brighter side to these developments. Especially since May 1968, the locus of contestation has moved from the general to the specific. Criminals challenge the prison; asylum inmates, attendants, and therapists disrupt the hospital; welfare workers and clients protest against the bureaucracy; housewives and consumers organize against the corporations; community residents march against the spread of nuclear generators; minority groups contest the injustices of the legal system. The revolution proceeds not against the state and capitalism; it is fueled not by the parties and the unions; but at the local level, in concrete situations, in particular institutions, it moves unexpectedly this way and that without apparent logic. This scenario is like that in the concept of the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, where social order is undermined by a nomadic guerrilla tactic that is impervious to attack. Thus Foucault celebrates the demise of the traditional intellectual and the rise of a new breed of radical protesters. By speaking only for themselves and their local situation, the specific intellectuals raise effective arms Foucault thinks, against 'the microphysics of power'.
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In 1971-72 Foucault participated in a movement called the Prison Information Group (GIP), which organized for prison reform. The practice of GIP exemplified the new role of the specific intellectual. Like Guattari in his protest against mental institutions, Foucault did not pretend to speak for the prisoners, to name their discontents, to become the subject of their oppression. Instead GIP, manipulating the celebrity of its members, helped to create a space in which the voice of the prisoners could be heard. By marching outside the prison walls, GIP members lured the attention of the media to the problems of prisoners but refused to speak in their names. In this way the prisoners' protest could not be squelched by the administrators with impunity, because the population in general had been alerted to the deplorable conditions of prison life.
If it is granted that the specific intellectual uncovers sources of radicalism outside the workplace, it remains unclear in Foucault's discourse how protest against the technology of power can be effective. While marveling at the insights of Discipline and Punish, readers conclude pessimistically that the new discipline of knowledge and power that spreads so extensively throughout the social space is more effective than capitalism and more ominous than imperialism.13
The limitations of Foucault's self-consciousness extend farther to the question of reference or situation. Foucault does not interrogate, as Marx did, the conditions of his own thought. He never asks about the historical conjuncture in which he raises questions. There is an absence of reflexiveness in his texts that is disturbing, one that transcends the supposed inability to analyze one's own archive. For Marx the existence of the proletariat and the capitalist mode of production were the conditions for the development of socialist theory. Similarly for Foucault, one can ask: What are the social conditions for a theory to emerge and maintain that history is a morphology of knowledge/power?
The strategy behind asking the question of the social
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context of Foucault's discourse is not to reduce the meaning of his text to the social level. Marx's thought, for example, was not 'determined by' industrial revolution, but found its power and its limits in its self-conscious insertion in the social field. Marx adopted the standpoint of the proletariat thereby at once limiting the claims to truth of his discourse and connecting it politically to the historical conjuncture. A parallel strategy can be followed in relation to Foucault's texts.
At issue is the question of totalization. In the first chapter I compared Foucault's position to Sartre's. I argued that Foucault was right to reject totalization at the ontological or analytical level. The field of analysis must remain open and unbounded. The theorist can only propose the analysis of specific features of the social field, perhaps drawing con- nections between those features and other levels but no more than that. The totality remains a horizon of thought, never its object. I also argued that at the epistemological or interpretive level a moment of totalization was desirable and unavoidable. At the pre-theoretical level, before the object of investigation is established or the categories developed, the theorist makes a choice. This choice concerns a political judgement about what is important in the present conjuncture, about what needs to be done, about the theorist's relation to his or her world and the relation of the theorist's work to this world. At this moment of theory formulation a form of totalization is implicit if not explicit. The problem with Foucault's discourse in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality rests in large measure with the absence of epistemological totalization. Rarely in these texts does the reader find any mention of the present conjuncture as a hermeneutic source of the text.
From the standpoint of Foucault's own strategy of placing sharp limits on reason, of insisting on the interrelation of power and knowledge, of undermining all claims to absolute,
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universal truth, the lack of self-reflexivity makes no sense. The most salutary method for Foucault to forestall universalist truth claims in his own text is to situate his own position and make finite his own assertions, in short to acknowledge and make explicit his own role as a specific intellectual. In the texts I have examined here Foucault never once gives a shape to his standpoint in the present conjuncture. The figure of the specific intellectual is not one that Foucault applies to himself. In interviews and talks Foucault suggests that his texts may be employed as tools, as 'offres de jeu', in the task of struggling against domination. He never elaborates the relation between the specific intellectual, one involved directly in. combat against domination, and the writer who assembles tools for that combat. It can be argued that what I referred to as a lack of systematization in Foucault's position derives from his refusal to totalize his thought at the epistemological level and elaborate the relation between his discourse and his possible role as a specific intellectual.
The irony in all of this is that self-reflexivity furthers not undermines Foucault's anti-rationalist animus. Since the task of contextualization is consonant with Foucault's main intellectual strategy and since its elaboration would strengthen the case for his position, I will attempt to provide that analysis in. the concluding pages.
Two dangers need to be avoided. First, I am not imagining Foucault's intentions. I am not substituting myself in the place of Foucault and through imaginative reconstitution inventing the totalization that informs his personal relation to the world. What I intend is to locate the possible connections between the texts Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality and the present conjuncture. From the perspective of critical social theory I am interested in. the strengths of Foucault's texts, not in his consciousness. I seek further to clarify a theoretical stance, not enter someone's mind. Second, the results will be partial. The relations
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I seek to outline between the texts and the world do not form a completely unified whole. They are fragmentary and suggestive rather than final and closed.
There are three lines of intersection between Foucault's texts and the present conjuncture which both confirm the significance of those texts and improve the position of critical theory: (1) the concept of discourse in general and the critique of reason and absolute forms of rationality, and (3) the mode of information. I will discuss each of these lines of intersection in turn.
The first issue may be posed bluntly. Why is the question of discourse pertinent? There is one place, during an interview with the Esprit group, that Foucault does raise this question:
There exists today a problem which is not without importance for political practice: the problem of the laws, of the conditions of exercise, of functioning, of the institutionalization of scientific discourses. That's what I have undertaken to analyze historically by choosing the discourses which have, not the strongest epistemological structure . . . but the densest and most complex field of positivity.14
While recognizing the problem, Foucault does, not pursue it at any great length. If he had, he would have been able to argue that the contemporary role of the human sciences authorizes - or better compels - critical social theory to adopt a standpoint from which discourse/practice, 'truth' and modes of domination, are problematized and analyzed historically.
At the center of the task of critical social theory is the effort to conceptualize and empirically demonstrate the historicity of contemporary modes of domination. This aim differentiates critical theory from 'scientific' sociology, the latter being content with the measurement and explanation of social phenomena. Critical theory, on the contrary, with its method of historical reconstruction, undermines
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the appearance of naturalness of modes of domination, a naturalness that scientific sociology, regardless of the intentions of its practitioners, tends to confirm. Marx accomplished the task of critical social theory perhaps to a degree never equaled before or since by demonstrating the historicity and specifying the mechanisms of domination inherent in industrial capitalism. However, he fell back into the ideological mode of liberal political economy by framing the advances of his position in. terms of liberal norms, i.e., universal emancipation. After revealing the inability of liberal political revolution to achieve democracy (classless society), he went on to argue that the proletarian social revolution could accomplish that end. The metaphysic of the complete abolition of domination reinserted itself within critical theory.
A chief objective of this book has been to show that Foucault has accomplished a task similar to that of Marx, but without much of the accompanying metaphysical baggage. Foucault's analysis of prisons and sexuality historicizes contemporary phenomena, undermining their naturalness, and specifies the mechanisms of domination inherent in them (the Panopticon and true discourses). This is a tremendous achievement from the perspective of critical social theory. Yet it is an achievement won at the cost of abandoning many of the theoretical positions of Marx and Western. Marxism. In order to grasp the specific mechanisms of domination inherent in the phenomena of prisons and sexuality Foucault adopts a Nietzschean strategy of genealogy oriented to discontinuity, to the differential play of power relations in the historical phenomena; a post-structuralist strategy of detotalization oriented to the particularity of the phenomena; and a structuralist strategy oriented to remove the analysis from the register of subjectivist humanism. Each of the three strategies effected a tactical reversal of the metaphysical. field in which critical theory had been inscribed. The first two strategies have received
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enough attention in earlier chapters; the third merits another look.
From liberal and Marxist perspectives discourses about society have the intention of furthering emancipation. Knowledge promotes freedom. This basic assumption characterizes discourse since the Enlightenment. A serious problem arises, however, when it can be shown that such discourses become organized into disciplinary institutions, both in the West and the East, and begin to exert powerful shaping influences (not unlike domination) on the social field, The examples Foucault provides are criminology and psychoanalysis. (In studies before 1968 he demonstrated similar effects regarding medicine and psychiatry.) The human sciences project 'man' as their object and, with the intention of liberating that object, begin to control it in a manner not unlike that of the natural sciences.
The problem has a double source. First, the subjectivist object 'man' and second, the objectivist subject 'reason'. To conceptualize the object 'man' one necessarily gives it a shape, one creates one's object in a metaphysical act similar to the account in Genesis. For examples of this procedure one need only turn to the Marxist concept of the proletariat or the liberal concept of economic man. Shades of Stakhanov and Robinson Crusoe pervade the pages of the most distinguished academic journals. Foucault attempts to sidestep this conceptual impasse by systematically 'objectivizing the object'. He takes discourse/practices as they appear in their textuality and 'micro-physics of power' without resorting to a subject who would act behind them, author them, be responsible for them, cause them. He concentrates on the internal regularities of these objects, ferreting out their mechanisms of domination. He does not have to ask what is the relation between discourses or ideas and practices or behaviors, because that distinction itself is rooted in the Cartesian dualism that is the substance of the notion of 'man' in the human sciences.
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The second problem in the human sciences concerns assumptions about the scientist or scholar, the subject of knowledge. Here the difficulty is greater with liberalism, positivism and official Marxism than it is with Western. Marxism. As long as reason is posited as a neutral tool, or as one that can only promote freedom, the power effects of reason are obscured, masked and legitimated. Long ago Descartes wrote in effect that if the world does not conform to reason, so much the worse for the world. Reason orders reality, but at the same time insists that it has no obscuring influence on its object. No doubt cognitive activity (reason) is necessary for theoretical and scientific work. Yet the tendency in the human sciences is to inflate the scope and reality of reason into an originating principle that becomes the end, not just the means, of generating discourses. If reason in some form is the neutral or freedom-promoting origin of the human sciences, the intellectual becomes a universal figure either at the head of the revolutionary vanguard or the pinnacle of the social hierarchy. To avoid the dangers of the surreptitious power of reason Foucault refuses to systematize his position, to organize his work into coherent categories which through their logical impeccability alone command adherence.
The criticism of Foucault that one finds repeated most often is that the term 'power', as he employs it, is too vague and unlocalized. If power is everywhere, the critics contend, the prospect for democratization is slim. Foucault's analysis according to this view leads to pessimism or quietism, a sort of apolitical stance advocated by the notorious 'new philosophers'. While this charge is serious enough, it can be made even more substantial by associating it with Foucault's formulation of the problem of domination. The 'technologies of power' shape practices and constitute modes of domination. Modes of domination can be overturned, as happened to the 'torture' system of punishment of the Old Regime. But in Foucault's writings, new modes of domination always seem
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to replace old ones, just as the Panopticon emerged in the nineteenth century. Not only is power omnipresent in. Foucault's discourse, but the impression is left that history is a succession of modes of domination, a Sisyphean tale of endless technologies of power, of an interminable struggle against domination.
Indeed, Foucault has a strong determination not to privilege the present social formation, not to allow the least trace of progressivism to appear in his text. This tendency leads some critics to view him as a pessimist, as has been mentioned before. At the same time it can be argued that another interpretation of his work is equally plausible and in fact preferable. If one rejects evolutionist progressivism because of its tendency to legitimize the present, the reasonable alternative is to focus on the limitations of all social formations. Such a strategy does not rule out a critical perspective that opposes domination; it simply reduces the promises of radical change. The existing form of domination is the one that is oppressive and must be resisted, even if there is no guarantee that a new form of domination will not arise to replace the old. The vision that emerges out of Foucault's writing is not necessarily pessimism, but it is one shorn of the dream of 'solving the riddle of history', of ending class society forever, of ridding the world once and for all of tyrants. To reject evolutionism is only to reject teleology, not the possibility of democratizing change. The notion of power in Foucault is inchoate and the notion of domination pervasive because reason cannot legislate the finiteness of power or the limit of domination. It can do no more than point to specific instances of each and make them intelligible so they may better be resisted. To argue otherwise, to think that reason can represent domination in its essence, place it in a conceptual basket and hand it over to the oppressed in a neat bundle, is to inflate reason beyond its inherent limitations.
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And yet certainly the concepts of power and domination in Foucault are not without their difficulties. For Foucault goes so far in. limiting the scope of reason that he is conceptually unable to distinguish the nature of his own discourse (one that reveals the play of domination) from the discourses about which he writes (those that institute systems of domination). The demand for such a distinction raises subtle interpretive questions which cannot be adequately treated here, although some clarification of the issues can be attempted. Foucault, like Nietzsche, insists that reason is implicated in power. Therefore his own discourse is a form of power. Nothing prevents Foucault, who recognizes this state of affairs, from self-consciously reflecting on the power implication of his own discourse, of making explicit his political position and attempting to account for the conditions of its possibility.
The concept of discourse and the critique of reason are features of Foucault's texts that relate without difficulty to the present conjuncture. The third element in. the task of situating these texts - the mode of information - involves a, more remote and indirect association. In a very general way Foucault's texts pose the question of language in. relation to society. They thread a thin line between the traditional Marxist emphasis on action (praxis, labor) and the Western Marxist problematic of ideology and the superstructure. Foucault's category discourse/practice draws the attention of critical theory to systems of language as they are related to and shape experience. Surveillance, the confessional, psychoanalysis - these are 'technologies of power' that have their great effect through their linguistic permutations. Surveillance, for example, is accomplished by setting in place a flow of information from the object under scrutiny to the authorities and to the collection of that information in files or memory banks. The existence of this network of information and the awareness of it by the scrutinized population constitutes the technology of power. Domination here takes
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the form, not of personal control (feudalism), nor of structural manipulation of activity (capitalism), but of complex articulation of language.
I employ the term mode of information to designate forms of linguistic experience that have emerged in. the course of the twentieth century. The analysis of these linguistic forms and their relations with other social levels (work, family politics, leisure) must be placed high on the agenda of critical theory. As Raymond Williams has astutely observed. 'The major modern communication systems are now so evidently key institutions in advanced capitalist societies that they require the same kind of attention, at least initially, that is given to the institutions of industrial production and distribution.'15
In the context of the analysis of the mode of information Foucault's recent texts assume their full importance. The mode of information provides the historical conditions of possibility for the category discourse/practice. At the same time the category discourse/practice provides the best interpretive framework for the analysis of the mode of information. This statement must remain at the hypothetical level, simply because the category discourse/ practice has not been applied self-consciously to the mode of information. I am proposing it as a suggestion for future studies, and also as a contextual support for Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. My position may be summed up as follows: Marxist and Western Marxists need to pay heed to these texts because they are the best examples of critical social theory in the age of the mode of information. Foucault's texts do not work to undermine capitalism; they are not adequate as class analysis; they do not provide a link between the superstructure and the substructure; they do not expose the ideological play behind the culture industry. Yet for all this they remain key works in the development of a critical theory of advanced society.
Face to face interactions with oral exchanges of symbols,
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supplemented by written communications, have diminished in the texture of social life. In their place a variety of communication patterns have come into existence. These may be enumerated and analyzed according to their progressive dissimilarity to the older types. Telephone conversations are perhaps the most like pre-existing forms of communication. In this case verbal interchange occurs, but one through a gap of physical separation. However, one completely new form of interaction is made possible through the telephone: strangers may present themselves through their voices alone. A stranger obtains, the opportunity for dialogue that in the past was reserved for acquaintances and those who were admitted to verbal interchange by the individual's decision to do so.
Still further removed from the traditional communication form is the television 'conversation'. Superficially a monologue, television communication contains many of the features of dialogue in that the viewer-listener is changed by the experience: he or she has consumed meanings. Television, of course,, consists in visual and verbal messages which are received at the discretion of the viewer-listener. Here the visual image and voice of a stranger can enter one's home, simulating the visit of a friend. Once again the expansion of communicational forms relativizes the traditional forms: a friend's visit may contain less meaning, be less important than the visit of an. electric emission. Social reality then changes its shape: social interactions are a combination of face-to-face verbal exchanges and electronic audio-visual emissions. Are both then equally real or important for the individual? How are the prospects of democratic community changed by the existence of the new melange of communication forms?
Perhaps furthest removed from the traditional language experience is the 'conversation' between two information processing machines or computers. In this case there is no physical presence and no verbal exchange. A simulation of
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written information, processed by complex permutations, is exchanged from one machine to another. Yet this information can be about human beings in society. The exchange between the machines must be counted as part of the linguistic experience of the society. In fact, it may, in a particular case, affect the lives of certain individuals very deeply, more than face-to-face conversations between friends. The machines, for example, may be gathering and exchanging information about the qualifications of an individual for welfare payments, or medicare, or the record of a criminal, or the credit history of a businessman. In these cases the outcome of the machine's conversation may decisively influence the life of an individual. Machine conversations are part of our linguistic community: they constitute an increasing portion of our social interactions. As members of our linguistic world, what is their relation to a democratic community?
The language form unique to the mode of information that receives most attention today is that of individual to computer. In the past few years, millions have attained 'computer literacy', the ability to communicate in the 'foreign' language of the newest 'immigrants'. The computer presents fascinating questions for analysis. Its linguistic and epistemological status are by no means clear despite the flurry of essays, for and against, on the question of computer intelligence. An analogy with Marx's analysis of the machine is appropriate. The computer stores not dead labor but dead knowledge. It replaces not the arms and muscles of the worker but his or her mental functions of memory and calculation, among others. It stands against the living worker, to continue the Marxist analogy, like his or her alien essence, dominating the work process. The reversal of priorities Marx saw in the factory whereby the dead (machines) dominate the living (workers) is extended by the computer to the realm of knowledge.
The linguistic relation of computer and individual goes beyond this comparison. Like mechanical machines, the computer
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shapes the mind of its user; unlike older contrivances, it engages the user's consciousness. Its powers seem to enchant users who become absorbed by the capabilities it offers. The line dividing subject and object is blurred, far more than it was in Marx's analysis of labor.16 Which is the subject, computer or individual? Which has the capacity to generate knowledge, has greater mental powers? Whence comes the fascination users seem to derive from conversations with unknown partners through the mediation of computers?17
These are obviously a few of the new forms of language experiences that now inhabit our social landscape. They concern only the changed linguistic form itself, excluding any discussion of the interplay between the linguistic form and other social levels. For example, there is the relation of the new linguistic forms to the world of work,18 the mode of production, as was discussed briefly in chapter 2. There is also the relation of the new linguistic forms to the world of leisure and consumption. One need only mention in this regard the proliferation of electronic game arcades and the spread of advertising through television. Finally, there is the relation of the new linguistic forms to the political world. In chapter 4. I discussed the importance of the new mode of surveillance, an extension of the Panopticon, made possible by computer conversations. In these respects the new linguistic forms have an increasingly larger impact on all the major institutions of advanced society.
Taken together, the study of the new forms of language experience and the relation of these new forms to other social institutions constitutes the substance of the term 'mode of information'. I am not arguing that the mode of information completely replaces - the mode of production: society could not continue without the uninterrupted production of commodities. Nor am I arguing that the mode of information is the only or even central concern of critical theory. Questions of nuclear war and ecological balance with nature must remain the top priorities of critical inquiry
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for obvious reasons. What I am saying is rather that the social field is changing rapidly, that new forms of social interaction based on electronic communications devices are replacing older types of social relations and that the place of language experience is an important area in the new social fabric. Therefore critical theory must take cognizance of the novelty of the situation and reconstitute its conceptual orientation accordingly. Marxism, clutching to the theory of the mode of production, does not provide seminal pathways into the new social world. 19
Foucault's discourse analysis takes on its full significance for critical theory when the mode of information is taken into account. The emergence and spread of the new linguistic experiences constitute the historical conditions for a method of analysis that gives due recognition to the discursive nature of practice, that conceptualizes truth in relation to power, that detotalizes the historical-social field and that sets strict limits to the scope of reason, reason both as analytic power and as the shape of consciousness in human beings acting in the social field. Foucault's interpretive strategy is particularly suited to a social field pervaded by linguistically rich forms of action. Alternative methods err in two opposite directions: (1) they analytically constitute language in formalist schemes that obscure the social context and the action component of experience, or (2) they give priority to action in a manner that obscures the linguistic quality of experience. Structuralist, semiotic and literary approaches generally move in the first direction; Marxist tendencies move in the second direction. Foucault's recent work steers a course between the dangers of idealist Scylla and materialist Charybdis. His position makes intelligible a level of analysis consonant with emergent forms of social relations. Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality have generated so much interest, I believe, because they speak so directly to the present conjuncture, providing a genuinely critical perspective on a social world that is resistant to intellectual formations like liberalism and Marxism
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that are rooted in assumptions of a bygone era. The mode of information renders obsolete position which depict human beings as rational ghosts in corporal machines or laboring animals acting against nature in an alienating social fabric.
NOTES
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