Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1996 17:55:52 -0500 (CDT)
From: Darlene Sybert <engds-AT-showme.missouri.edu>
Subject: Re: Foucault & Law


On Thu, 20 Jun 1996 CHAMBERS-AT-POLISCI.UMN.EDU wrote:
> In partial response to your last question I would give a resounding yes.  
> In vol. I of HoS Foucault makes it quite clear (clearer than he does in 
> other places) that a space remains for BOTH juridical and disciplinary 
> power.  Walzer (and often Taylor and others as well) has to assume that 
> Foucault cannot account for juridical power if he is to come to the 
> conclusion that Foucault is a nihilist (or an anarchist).  Focuault turns 
> most of his attention to disciplinary power because of its often 
> invisible and always insidious nature, but he never assumes that 
> disciplinary power wholly replaces the juridical system--it does in fact 
> operate on this "underside of the law."
> 

	It is in HoS that Foucault says while we still have not cut 
off the head of the king,.i.e, juridical representation is still at work, 
new mechanisms of power are not reducible to the representation of law.
Instead, power mechanisms since the 18th century have gradually taken 
charge of men as living bodies.  And this power operates in terms of 
normalization instead of law, in terms of control instead of punishment...
but his conclusion is that, regardless of all this, we retain an image of 
power that equates it with law and "right."  But what Foucault does in 
the next few pages is describe power as a multiplicity of forces that are 
both intentional and non-subjective.  Power corrupts because of something 
inherent in "power" not becuase of something inherent in the subject: 
something insidious
	Foucault's best expression of this autonomy of power is in HoS,
I think, 
	"But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of 
an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides 
over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which 
control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important 
economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a 
society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is characterized
by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted  level where 
they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics  which, 
becoming connected to one another , attracting and propagating one 
another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, 
end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the 
aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to 
have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an 
implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken 
strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose "inventors" or 
decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy" (95).

	Of course, one reason I am impressed is because that is such a 
beautiful sentence.  Faulkner is "way outclassed," as my students say.

Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~engds/index.html
University of Missouri, Columbia  (English)
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        But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
        Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
        That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
                                        -Lord Byron
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