Regimes of truth, disciplined bodies,

secured populations
An overview of Michel Foucault
Catherine Chaput
Iam no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who Iam
and do not ask me to remain the same.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Knowledge is the process through which the subject finds himself modified by what he
knows, or rather by the labor performed in order to know.
Remarks on Marx

In his essay, What is an Author (1970; trans 1977), Michel Foucault posed what
he rightly suggested was a slightly odd question (113), especially for atheorist
who, at the end of alife cut short by his AIDS-related death in June of 1984, had
himself authored well over 700 titles (see Clark). Among his many reflections
in this important essay, Foucault argues that the nineteenth century produced
authors of adifferent order from previous writers and thinkers. He calls these
new authors initiators of discourse practices, citing Sigmund Freud and Karl
Marx as exemplars because they not only penned great books, but also, and
more significantly, both established the endless possibility of discourse (131).
Discourse initiators distinguish themselves from novelists and other creative
authors who start new genres (e.g. the initiation of the Gothic novel by Anne
Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and others). Genre originators call analogous texts
into being while authors such as Freud and Marx initiate both similar and different texts, creating aspace for the introduction of elements other than their
own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated
(132). Regardless of ones affiliation with psychoanalytic or Marxist criticism, it
is nearly impossible to produce atheoretically engaged argument that bears no
allegiance to the fields opened up by these two thinkers. Ido not think it hyperbolic to suggest that Michel Foucault also be counted among the discourse
initiators of the twentieth century. His oeuvre of literally hundreds of texts constructs arich constellation of theoretical insights that have framed responses,
uses and negations that owe their debt to this unique thinker.
ScienceFictionFilmandTelevision 2.1(2009),91104

ISSN1754-3770(print) 1754-3789(online)

LUP

92

Catherine Chaput

While Foucault, who studied and taught psychiatry and philosophy, might
obviously be indebted to Freud, his debts to Marx and Marxism represent underdeveloped but important themes in his work, especially for sf scholars interested in the economic and material reconstructions of emerging and imagined
worlds. As astudent of Louis Althusser and ashort-term member of the Communist party, Foucaults student activism, his efforts in prison advocacy and
his participation in various decolonising movements, particularly the Algerian
efforts to oust French occupation, should not be surprising. However, like many
of his contemporaries including his classmate Jean-Paul Sartre Foucault
became disillusioned with the communist party in particular and organised
politics more generally. As part of this burgeoning poststructuralist moment,
Foucault refused the notion of a self-identical subjectivity. That is to say, he
believed that no one person maintained acoherent aspect of him- or herself
throughout the varied activities of his or her life. As he says, you do not have
toward yourself the same kind of relationships when you constitute yourself
as apolitical subject who goes and votes or speaks up in ameeting, and when
you try to fulfill your desires in asexual relationship (The Final Foucault 10).
Long before we become cyborgs enmeshed in atechnoscience that complicates,
multiplies and rescripts our identities, we become humanised through varied
discursive mechanisms, made into subjects who must wrestle with many of the
same questions that sf studies explore: the role of science within social relations;
the politics, economics and ethics of community formations; and, ultimately,
the notion and production of being.
We can divide Foucoults work according to his varied theoretical productions, which shift from an early period predominantly interested in what he
calls the archaeology of discourse (tracking knowledge production through
institutional formations) to alater period that privileges the genealogy of power/
knowledge relations (tracking power through the regulation of the body). The
early work focuses on knowledge production and the ways that discourse formations discipline away of thinking, and thus away of engaging others, while
the later work follows power as it explicitly acts on bodies, disciplining practices of being, and thus away of understanding others. An important subset of
this second method takes shape around governmentality and biopower, critical schemas for understanding contemporary nation-states and their rule over
populations. While these theories were laid out in lectures that Foucault gave in
the late 1970s and early 1980s at the prestigious Collge de France, they are only
now becoming available in English translation through aPalgrave Macmillan
series which is compiling each years lectures into book form. One February
1978 lecture (translated into English from an Italian translation of the original)

Archive: An overview of Michel Foucault

93

did circulate earlier, under the title Governmentality, but it remained relatively
decontextualised until the full publication of these lectures. The governmentality of biopower is, in effect, apresently unfolding theory for many Anglophone
theorists. Indeed, the French version of these lectures only precedes the English translation by afew years. They will, no doubt, ignite further discussion of
Foucaults importance to contemporary political and cultural analyses. Therefore, in addition to summarising both the early and late Foucault, this overview
gives special attention to these lectures.
Archaeology of discourse formations (pre-1970)

Foucaults early work investigates the relationship between power and knowledge as well as the problem of institutional relationships to the political and
economic structures of society, aconcern he makes clear in alater interview
(The Final Foucault 161). Yet this early work, including Madness and Civilization
(1961; trans. 1965), The Birth of the Clinic (1963; trans. 1973), The Order of Things
(1966; trans. 1970) and his methodological defence, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; trans. 1971), coheres because, first, the enquiries focus on institutional apparatuses designed around the problem of normalising subjectivities,
and, second, the method of analysis historicises these institutions vis--vis an
exploration of the rules of discourse production. Collectively, this early work
discusses how deviant subjects are monitored and pulled back into the boundaries of normalcy. While increasingly suspicious of Marxism as an organised
platform for social change, Foucault remains dedicated to asocial critique of
institutions through which the political economic subjects of capitalism are
normalised a goal not so distant from his mentors interest in ideological
state apparatuses. Althusser, like Foucault, uses ahermeneutic approach that
interprets each text as avalue which can only be determined through its complex relationship to awhole series of interconnected texts. For Althusser, this
makes meaning overdetermined, but grounded, in the last instance, in its political economic structure; for Foucault, this political economic structure remains
acritical component of his hermeneutic web even though he does not position
economics as the final instance. Foucaults early work historicises how capitalist
political economies deal with surplus populations, providing anuanced understanding of how these populations are identified, named and treated, as well
as an implicit plea to imagine human interactions differently. Foucault is often
heralded for his micropolitics, but his unbounded methodological practices
and his willingness to include amultiplicity of discursive objects into his inves-

94

Catherine Chaput

tigations do not lend themselves to narrow analytic frames. Indeed, the three
representative texts of this period take us from the mental hospital to the practices of medicine more generally to the organising principles of social scientific
enquiry writ large ever-widening spheres of enquiry.
Madness and Civilization, originally part of Foucaults dissertation work,
illustrates the complexity of his hermeneutic approach. Ostensibly a history
of mental illness and its institutional practices, his first major book examines
arange of texts exceeding the traditional academic boundaries of psychiatry,
exploring abroad sweep of ideas, practices, institutions, art and literature relating to mental illness. Any text related to the discourse about mental illness to
the rules for acceptable and unacceptable speech on mental illness contributed to an understanding of the role of institutionalised madness. Foucault
does not limit his study to what is said about madness, but also enquires into
the practices of treatment, many of which he views as tantamount to torture.
What is at stake, he asks, in this complex process by which society identifies,
names and treats the abnormal until he or she either becomes ineffectual or
fits into the boundaries of normalcy? Foucault concludes that it is nothing less
than the maintenance of aparticular form of reason (one that resonates with
the needs of an emergent political economic regime) and the suppression of
signifying practices such as madness that illuminate the limits of asocial
order premised on such reason. Scientific evolution, within the social sciences
just as much as the natural sciences, comes to be through powerfully normalising apparatuses such as the mental hospital. This normalisation must be viewed
as ameans for promulgating one unfolding of the world while suppressing its
implicit problematics, and we can see this through the broad discursive lens
which Foucault usefully models for us.
While his first book contributes to arange of cultural analyses that explore
how texts represent and maintain particular versions of the reasonable, the
rational and the normal, as well as how these discourses participate in the political economic landscape of their production, The Birth of the Clinic his second
major book explores how one particular institution, the medical field, trains
its practitioners through a distanced medical regard, or what Alan Sheridan
famously translates as a medical gaze. The development of modern medicine,
for Foucault, results from an epistemic break in knowledge formation and not
agradual accumulation of empirical evidence. Thus, the previous era of taxonomising gave way to an historical moment more compatible with the evolutionary
theories and metabolic metaphors of the modern capitalist era. This epistemic
break not unrelated to Thomas Kuhns notion of paradigm shifts holds
importance for sf scholars for two reasons: first, it makes clear that all branches

Archive: An overview of Michel Foucault

95

of science rest on philosophical/ideological premises and not merely on observable or quantifiable facts; and, second, it forces analyses to take account of the
episteme within which atext operates, noting the ruptures as well as the residual traces of other epistemic frameworks. The episteme, structured primarily
through discourses on knowledge, dictates the real. In the case of the clinic, it
provides the lens through which doctors and patients distinguish what does
and does not exist: the episteme enables the medical gaze, apower-laden gaze
that directs our sight patterns and thus instructs our understandings. In this
book, Foucault not only analyses the birth of the clinic, or teaching hospital, he
also sets the terms of analysis for generations of future theorists. Many cultural
texts include critical scenes wherein doctors, positioned as expert practitioners,
misdiagnose or knowingly ignore obvious symptoms and the patients ardent
expression of them in favour of the prevailing medical knowledge the medical
gaze; this gaze, and not the subjects involved, determine what exists and how
we should understand it. This has an obvious relevance to sf films, such as The
Brood (Cronenberg Canada 1979) and Altered States (Russell US 1980), in which
altered states of being exceed or disrupt the medical gaze.
In The Order of Things, Foucault extends his critique of the medical profession into the entire field of human sciences, exposing supposedly objective
pursuits to an interestedness that can be measured in the discursive practices
of differing epistemes. The scope of this books investigations led to Foucaults
infamous claim that man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps bearing its end (387), instantly catapulting him into the centre of ongoing posthumanist discussions. If the human is merely an invention of our discursive
terrain, we have the ability to reconceptualise that epistemological ground and
invite subject positions beyond the human. This theoretical enquiry into the
sciences was crucial to the anti-foundational work that came after it. Foucault
was not against humanity per se, but was an outspoken critic of the various
knowledges produced with regard to the human.1 These knowledges, says The
Order of Things, emerge from epistemes with aselective notion of who constitutes the position of the human. This focus on knowledge production does not
mark Foucault as an intellectual historian but rather as one who understands
knowledge as an index of power discourse reveals aphilosophical episteme,
which empowers ontological selectivity. Each variant on the human, machine,
cyborg, animal or alien exists within and is made possible by its own discursive
1. Against overzealous literal interpretations of this statement, Foucault later clarifies that men constitute themselves in an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would never reach
an end (Remarks on Marx 123). Aparticular version of the human the being coextensive with capitalisms rationality is arecent invention and not necessarily the form the human must take.

96

Catherine Chaput

regime, acomplex system that provides the rules for seeing and being within
the boundaries of that world. That such aclaim appears obvious to those of us
accustomed to cultural critique bears testimony to the pervasive appeal of this
groundbreaking work.
Foucault explains and defends the methodology that allowed him to announce
the passing of auniversal, transcendental and unified notion of humanity in
Archaeology of Knowledge. In explicit opposition to both the traditional annals
school of tracking long periods of historical continuity and the dominant structuralist tradition of approaching language through binary oppositions, Foucault
explicates his counter-methodology for understanding discourse as the regulation of truth-statements particular to a given historical-political regime. He
neither denies that astructure of relationships can be assembled nor that language, the unconscious and the imagination are governed by these structures.
Instead, he positions himself against the scientific production, or a cultural
critique of that production, which tethers itself to pre-established narratives.
His method aims, he says to free [cultural analyses] from all transcendental
narcissism (203) of origins as well as teleologies. In its prevailing form, structuralism gives meaning to speech acts, suggesting that some observable truth or
meaning continuously exists as an inherent component of particular discourse
formations. Foucault postulates aradical break from this signifying articulation
between discourse and meaning, as well as discourse and history, by suggesting
that their importance lies within the internal relationships among the constituent components and not in atemporal past or future. In short, the book lays out
his theory for textual analyses in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off
(16).2 The Archaeology of Knowledge offers one counter-method, but Foucault
became increasingly interested in the genealogy of power/knowledge and its
embodiment as another counter-method.
Genealogy of power/knowledge relations (post-1970)

The crucial difference marking Foucaults later work is not so much amethodological shift as it is as ashift in the object of study from discourse as it forms
institutional and disciplinary knowledge to power as it forms the embodied
subjects of differing epistemes. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971; trans.
1977) outlines this latter approach to cultural criticism a genealogy that
2. An excellent place to begin studying Foucaults method is the short essay, The Discourse on Language, attached as an appendix to the Pantheon edition to the Archeology of Knowledge.

Archive: An overview of Michel Foucault

97

captures events and texts that might appear to be outside of atraditional linear history or contained structural analysis. Like his archaeology, this method
opposes the search for origins, direct cause-and-effect relations and imposed
meta-theories. In their best formations, such methodologies unmask ideologies while their worst formations impose normalising and tyrannical regimes.
In both formations, truth becomes what Foucault calls the sort of error that
cannot be refuted because it [has] hardened into an unalterable form in the
long baking process of history (144). Alternatively, his genealogical method
looks toward accidents, deviations and difference in order to illustrate the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself (147). Each changing
episteme interprets its world according to anew order of knowledge, violently
appropriating an old system of rules, reconstructing it and ultimately imposing a new direction for social participation. In this sense, the development
of humanity is aseries of new discursive regimes. The role of genealogy is to
connect different events according to the emergence of different interpretations and to explain these different interpretations as a perspective rather
than auniversal or transcendental truth (152).3 In his later work, Foucault utilises this approach to understand arange of embodied practices and the power
regimes connected to such practices.
Foucaults Discipline and Punish (1975; trans. 1977), among his most influential texts for cultural theorists, enacts this genealogical method. His exploration
of the prison articulates how bodies are disciplined into docility through constant surveillance. Because no body can go unexamined in such aregime, the
material and metaphorical uses of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon come to the
foreground. As Foucault discusses the original Panopticon, aprison blueprint
featuring acentral guard tower and circular field of vision, he also advocates the
Panopticon as ageneralizable model of functions, away of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (205). These strategies form apolicy of
coercions that act upon the body, acalculated manipulation of its elements, its
gestures, its behaviors (138). Disciplined bodies emerge from the spatial division
of individuals, the control of their activities, the organisation of individuals into
groups and the coordination of these different groups. Such disciplining takes
place in prisons, of course, but it equally occurs in the military, the corporate
world and in schools. This can be observed in Modern Times (Chaplin US 1936),
with its depiction of the factory, the prison, the suburb and the department
3. In Truth and Power, Foucault defines genealogy as aform of history which can account for the
constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc. without reference to asubject which
is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness through the
course of history (117).

98

Catherine Chaput

store as modern, disciplinary sites, and in the more overtly science-fictional

cities of Metropolis (Lang Germany 1927), Blade Runner (Scott US/Singapore
1982) and Gattaca (Niccol US 1997), which spatialise class relations. The extension of this work into arange of other inquiries was not beyond Foucaults original intention. Indeed, he asks, Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories,
schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (228). More even than
Foucaults early work on institutional knowledge formation and the material
worlds it brings into being, this form of imperceptible surveillance speaks to
the broad concerns of cultural critics. Bodies are constantly monitored and
disciplined into acceptable practices and this is only increasing within the digital age wherein we each leave our online footprints for corporations to catalogue, organise and return to us through carefully constructed niche marketing.
Minority Report (Spielberg US 2002), with its retina-scan-triggered customised
advertising, captures this image of adisciplined future.
The other primary example of Foucaults genealogical period is his History
of Sexuality, originally conceived in eight parts, the first volume of which was
published as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976; trans. 1978) and
later retitled as The Will to Knowledge. Only two other volumes were published,
The Uses of Pleasure (1984; trans. 1985) and The Care of the Self (1984; trans. 1986).
Perhaps because of the long hiatus between the first volume and the other two,
or perhaps because the project as he conceived it remained incomplete, the
volumes are treated relatively independently of one another with the first and
third volumes receiving the most scholarly interest. In volume one, Foucault
uses sexuality its discourse formations and the disciplining of its practices as
a case study for his examination of how power/knowledge function through
bodies. He questions the dominant narrative that there exist coercive mechanisms which demand the repression of embodied and linguistic acts of natural
sexual desire. On the contrary, he argues the last two centuries have witnessed
the burgeoning of sexual discourse and this represents apower formation that
demands to see, to know and to identify. This embeddedness of power and sexuality mirrors the organisation of resistance to dystopias on sexual and affective
levels in such sf films as THX 1138 (Lucas US 1971) or ZPG (Campus UK 1972).
The regulation of sexuality functions as one technology of biopower or the
embodiment of power on populations. For Foucault, power encompasses both
negative and positive elements power represses but it also produces. Rather
than understanding power as acoercive force that acts upon relatively agentless
victims, Foucault asserts that where there is power, there is resistance and that
one is always inside power, there is no escaping it (95). If the discourse on
sexuality serves as akey apparatus of biopower in Occidental history, then that

Archive: An overview of Michel Foucault

99

history must be tracked. Thus, The Care of the Self details the Roman demand for
constant diligence with regard to ones own body, shifting the terms of sexuality
from pleasure to everyday self-vigilance, self-monitoring and self-disciplining.
Foucault focuses on how the self and the care of the self were conceived during the period of antiquity, forming the ethical background for our own questions about subjectivity. These volumes, with their attention on the body and
its regulation, gesture toward biopower and biopolitics, an important, and still
unfolding, subset of Foucaults later thinking. Biopower, its history within the
capitalist nation-state and its attendant political apparatuses, however, are most
explicitly discussed in Foucaults lectures on governmentality.
Governmentality of biopower (lectures at the Collge de France)

During his tenure at the Collge de France, where he lectured at the end of his
career, Foucault addressed topics that later became his seminal books The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish but he also discussed other crucial
concepts that never developed into full books. Preserved as tape recordings,
these lectures are only now being transcribed and compiled into book form,
offering concise and readable chapters dedicated to the exploration of topics
often still developing in Foucaults thinking. Delivered as lectures, Foucault
addresses the everydayness of his contemporary life traffic, illness, his frustration with how the size of his lecture prevents dialogue with the audience.
The recent publication and translation of these lectures into English has added
depth to many of the most intriguing concepts of Foucaults later work. The
key books in this line are Society Must Be Defended (1997; trans. 2003), Security,
Territory, Population (2004; trans. 2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2004; trans.
2008), all of which breathe fresh air into older discussions of biopower and
biopolitics by such well-known extensions of Foucault as Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattaris AThousand Plateaus (1980; trans. 1987) or Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardts Empire (2000). Moreover, the theoretical scaffold constructed
from these lectures make explicit the importance of the burgeoning inquiries
into affect and biopower in such work as Brian Massumis Parables of the Virtual (2002). Consequently, agrowing body of scholarship has emerged that takes
up such critical concepts as governmentality, security and biopower.
In Society Must Be Defended (lectures from 1975 to 1976), Foucault introduces
his concept of biopower or the operations of power that secure and defend the
nation-state throughout their circulation within civil society linking Foucault
to a long line of Marxist thinking such as Antonio Gramscis exploration of

100 Catherine Chaput

cultural hegemony, Louis Althussers speculations about ideological state apparatuses and the Frankfurt Schools enquiries into the cultural industries, which
Foucault admitted in 1981 he should have known and studied much earlier
than was the case, saying Perhaps if Ihad read those works earlier on, Iwould
have saved useful time, surely: Iwouldnt have needed to write some things and
Iwould have avoided certain errors (Remarks on Marx 119). Rather than investigating the political economy of capitalism head-on, as Marx does, Foucault
and these other thinkers attempt to get behind capitalism to explore the institutional and individual practices that sustain its organisation. For instance,
Foucault argues that war is no longer amechanism for territorial acquisition
(and control over raw materials) but amethod for defending the state, giving it
validity, and empowering it to make live or let die (Society 241) as opposed to
earlier sovereign power that takes life and lets live. Not only does such power
demand that certain populations live, it demands that they live according to
specific boundaries of logic and rationality. Biopolitics finds its defence in war
and in statistics: birth and death rates, literacy rates, insurance rates, interest rates, and forecasts that enumerate future projects and quantify normalcy
within statistical averages. This form of power has no control over death but it
can control mortality (Society 248). He ends the last lecture of this year with an
even more provocative statement racism is the mechanism by which nationstates let die. Racism, inscribed into the formation of the nation-state, changes
the blunt military formulation if Iwant to live, you must die into abiological
formulation: death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or
the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier (255). While
Foucault explores this hypothesis by way of the Nazi extermination of the Jews,
we need only look at justifications for contemporary military operations: the
US invades Iraq to pre-empt its inherently dangerous leader who supposedly
harbours Middle Eastern (read Muslim) terrorists; Israel continuously fights
against the Hamas, and indeed all of Palestine, as they threaten the security of
the Jewish state; and the Serbians nearly eliminate the Kurds in order to assert
their national sovereignty. Societythe nation-state, that is must be defended,
war is the method and race is the justification. This formation offers insight into
race-based alien conflicts in sf films such as Independence Day (Emmerich US
1996) and Starship Troopers (Verhoeven US 1997) and in novels such as Robert
A. Heinleins Starship Troopers (1959), Orson Scott Cards Enders Game (1985)
and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelles Footfall (1985).
After ayear-long sabbatical during which Foucault presumably mulled over
this notion of biopower, he returned to his public lectureship determined to
provide a fuller picture. Security, Territory, Population (lectures from 1977 to

Archive: An overview of Michel Foucault 101

1978) focuses on security as the primary mechanism for governing national

populations.4 Foucault begins with the assertion that biopower functions
through security to enumerate probable events (e.g. birth, death, illness, labour
shortages) calculate the costs of maintaining various levels within these events
and determine the optimal deviations for agiven population. Optimal deviations, of course, are based on acost-benefit analysis. As conceived by Foucault,
biopower is the political logic used to manage and control populations through
speculations about the future based on probabilities and statistics. Security,
a main apparatus of biopower, informs the policies and practices that maximise potential outcomes based on economic bottom lines and diverts public
attention away from these bottom lines through the same practices, policies,
programmes, institutions and discourses. Instead of eliminating scarcity, this
technology calculates acceptable levels of scarcity and creates the range of conditions to which populations agree and within which populations act. Similarly,
there are acceptable levels of surveillance, waste, environmental destruction,
human death and so on. This conception of security necessarily contains within
itself the experiences of insecurity, creating the unstable milieu in which both
the modern nation-state and its organisation of free market capitalism flourish.
In this way, Foucault extends his earlier thesis about racism as acrucial state
mechanism into adiscussion of economics as the raison dtat arationality
particular to late modern nation-state formation.
Picking up on this notion of economic rationality of the state, The Birth of
Biopolitics (lectures from 1978 to 1979) explores the birth of neoliberalism as, at
least implicitly, concurrent with the birth of biopolitics. If security is the principle of calculation for this cost of manufacturing freedom, neoliberalism is its
rationality (65). Emphatic that neoliberalism is not the liberalism of Adam Smith
and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economists, Foucault
historicises this rationality through the evolution of the German ordoliberals
or the Freiburg School (some of whom, like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von
Mises, travelled and worked in England and the US, bringing their theories to
the likes of Milton Friedman and the infamous Chicago School of economics).
The Freiburg School takes the Frankfurt Schools criticism of mass-produced
irrationality and applies it to the state, arguing for the need to support the private sphere free from state regulations. Thus, they articulate the need for astate
under the supervision of the market rather than amarket supervised by the state
4. As Imentioned earlier, one of these lectures made its way into English-language scholarship as
early as 1979, and was collected with various critical responses in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991), edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. This collection is an
excellent introduction to governmental rationality and its application to critical theories.

102 Catherine Chaput

(116). Although thirty years old, these lectures are absolutely prescient of our
current global economic crisis, locating its rationality within aneoliberalism
premised on government intervention into society to ensure the purportedly
free competition of its members. The plethora of nation-states currently constructing rescue and/or economic revitalisation packages illustrates this logic.
Governments are not supposed to take care of their populations, but to secure
them through an economic logic that lets some die and forces others to live.
When this process stalls, governments are justified in prodding its free-market
citizens with stimulus packages creating the conditions for the population to
care for itself, maintaining the appropriate levels of life and death. Quite simply, the contemporary nation-state is a juridical structure of agovernmentality
pegged to the economic structure of capitalism (296).
In many ways, Foucaults late lectures particularly those on governmentality highlight the political economic concerns that are implicit but underdeveloped throughout his most recognised works. Thus, contemporary cultural
studies has yet to consider fully the multiple repercussions for public life when
such power/knowledge relationships are institutionalised, managing populations according to the economic rationalisation du jour. Moreover, existing
Foucauldian scholarship, albeit essential to theorising how individuals and
populations are identified, positioned and restricted in society, tends to focus
on Foucaults theories of discipline. Those studies account for only part of the
contemporary picture. Shifting attention to Foucaults notions of security and
governmentality challenges and extends operative critical theories to address
two critical concerns: first, the productivity of freedom vis--vis acceptable levels of unfreedom and, second, the paradoxes generated by a security society
that is premised on such insecurity. Who better to explore and intervene into
this political economic terrain of truth than critical theorists of sf, the domain
wherein future worlds are invented, tested and reinvented? As Carl Freedman
has argued, the conjunction of critical theory and science fiction is not fortuitous but fundamental (23), and Foucault offers many opportunities for productively exploring their convergence.
Foucault in his interviews

Foucaults interviews offer agood starting place for theorists interested in this
work but unsure where to begin. Like many other critical theorists whose work
is sweeping and whose prose can be dense, Foucault explicates the key kernels
of his thinking in interviews. Several noteworthy English-language collections

Archive: An overview of Michel Foucault 103

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 19721977 (1980), edited by Colin Gordon; Michel Foucault Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews
and Other Writings 19771984 (1988), edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman; The
Final Foucault (1994), edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen provide clear entry into the arch of Foucaults thinking on power/knowledge relations as they operate on bodies and societies. What these readings make clear is
that Foucault was not only an important theorist, but also an activist committed
to reconstructing amore just economic and political world. For instance, one
can read Nietzsche, Genealogy, History to discover that Foucault offers three
theories for developing counter-memory parody, disassociation, and sacrifice
but one has to read On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists (1972)
for an example of how to concretise these theories into potential practices. In
this interview, Foucault criticises the inadequacy of apeoples court that judges
the police. He contends that such acourt structure serves as amere derivation
on the traditional court structure a judicial apparatus for controlling and
reinscribing difference. As an alternative, he suggests what he admits is abit
idealised but certainly more just: aparodic repetition of the traditional court
that emphasises the problematics of policing. In this sense, parody is apolitical
practice and not simply atheoretical solution to an academic problem. Parody
brings ones judgment of the police into public discussion without repeating
the unjust logics of courtroom apparatus.
In another important interview, Truth and Power (1977; trans. 1980), Foucault
argues for aclass of intellectuals the specific intellectual who examine questions of real, material, everyday struggles rather than larger transhistorical narratives. In this dialogue, he claims that
Truth is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it;
it is subject to constant economic and political incitement ... it is produced and transmitted
under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of afew great economic and political apparatuses ... it is the issue of awhole political debate and social confrontation. (1323)

In a comment reminiscent of Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Foucault

asserts that the problem is not changing peoples consciousness or whats in
their heads but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth (133). An episteme determines what is and is not seen as truth
within aparticular time and place, but the political economic regime of that
chronotope determines its epistemic boundaries. Sf scholars who wish to consider how knowledge runs up against the walls constructed from real or imagined political economic landscapes will certainly benefit from engagement
with Foucault.

104 Catherine Chaput

Works cited
Clark, Michael P. Michel Foucault: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1983.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Trans.
A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France 19781979. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.
. The Final Foucault. Ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1994.
. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage,
1978.
. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.
13964.
. On Popular Justice: ADiscussion with Maoists. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings, Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 136.
. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994.
. Remarks on Marx. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semio
text(e), 1991.
. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France 19751976. Ed. Mauro
Bertani. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
. Truth and Power. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972
1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 10933.
. What is an Author? Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. 11338.
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000.