This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.

To that end I situate Foucault's work in a double problematic: those of critical social theory and a new social formation that I call the mode of information. Although Foucault's politics may be ambiguous, his works are profitably situated in relation to critical theory. He provides, I will argue, models of analysis that contain theoretical elements which, properly interpreted, open up new directions for critical theory, directions that can lead it out of its current impasses. But these new directions only become apparent when certain important changes in the social formation of advanced trial society are recognized. To that end I have coined the somewhat infelicitous phrase 'mode of information' to represent these changes and to contrast the current situation to Marx's concept of the mode of production.

The term 'mode of information' designates the new language experiences of the twentieth century brought about for the most part by advances in electronics and related technologies. This is not an essay on the mode of information and I have not attempted to elaborate the term into a full theory. Nonetheless I found it necessary to develop the term if only to illuminate the theoretical advances I find in Foucault's work and to contrast them with the traditions of critical theory based on the concept of the mode of production. In a future work I propose to offer a general theory of the mode of information.

The first two chapters attempt to situate Foucault's recent works in relation to Western Marxism and to the classical texts of Marx. The remaining chapters examine the relation of the theoretical developments in the early chapters to the historical texts of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. The utility of Foucault's writing for a new kind of social history is the point in question.

My research was facilitated by collegial and institutional assistance. A Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981-2 was invaluable in furthering my work. I also received a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the School of Humanities of the University of California, Irvine, as well as several grants from the Focused Research Program in Critical Theory at UC Irvine. Friends and colleagues provided criticism and encouragement, especially Jonathan Wiener, David Carroll and Frank Lentricchia. Anthony Giddens and John Thompson, editors of Polity Press, were especially generous with their time and helpful with their comments.

Earlier versions of three chapters, appeared in the following journals: Chapter 3 in Social Research, Vol. 49, Number 1; Chapters 2 and 5 in Humanities in Society Vol. 5, Numbers 3 and 4 and Vol. 2, Number 2 respectively. Their permission for later versions of these articles to appear in the present volume is gratefully acknowledged.