Powers of Vision, Visions of Power

Dana Polan

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)

Its central pages given over to a discussion of the interaction of voice

and image in contemporary cinema (especially Syberberg, Straub,
Duras), Gilles Deleuze's short study of the philosophy of the late Michel
Foucault is bound to be of interest to film scholars. Beyond the sheer
interest that such a book-the most explicit record of a long-running
encounter between two of the most important figures in contemporary
French thought-will hold for anyone interested in the development
of the French intellectual scene in recent years, Deleuze's book is one
of the most explicit and thorough demonstrations of the centrality of
a reflection on the visual in Foucault's work. Previous writers on
Foucault have suggested how this or that local moment in Foucault's
writings posed possibilities for an analysis of vision as power.' But no
one before Deleuze has so intensely argued that the interrogation of
vision was not merely a momentary and perhaps non-essential aspect
of Foucault's work but, quite the contrary, one of its essential driving
forces, an inescapable component of its overall perspective on power
in the modern age.
Increasingly, film theorists and historians have been drawn to Fou-
cault's work because it offers new ways to analyze the interconnections
between discourse and power," As a theoretically informed rethinking
of a social history of film becomes a priority in film studies (film's
investments in, and representations of, its moment), Foucault's work
has been fundamental in its displacement of traditional modes of an-
alyzing the relationships between discursive power and non-discursive
institutions. Against an older conception ofinstitutions defined in terms
of the restraint or repression of discourse, Foucault tried to construct
a theory of power as non-repressive, where institutions encourage
discursive acts (in no matter how controlled or scrutinized a way) as
part of a tactic of power that needs the expression of language, rather
than its absence or silence, in order to weave its webs of control and
discipline. The theoretical and historical advantages of such a positive 107
notion of power are already making their mark in an exciting rewriting
of the ideological operations of American cinema with this cinema
now coming increasingly to be understood as a site in which patterns
of desire are solicited, rather than feared."
And yet, I don't want to suggest in all that follows that Foucault's
writing offers something that we should accept uncritically or exclu-
sively. Recent work on the social history of film has had to rely on
the close textual analysis of specific film practices-whether individual
films or genres or a whole Hollywood mode of production-to specify
the sometimes hegemonic, but also sometimes counter-hegemonic, in-
teractions of specific signifying practices with their specific social in-
scriptions. For such research, Foucault's broad and frequently gener-
alizing comments on various orders of discourse have limited usefulness
in the precise study of the operations of specific textualities." Similarly,
as I will suggest later, Foucault may not help us much in thinking
through the ways textualiry is tied to questions of contradiction (within
discourse but also between discourses and between the discursive and
the non-discursive) and questions of sexual difference.' Indeed, in the
very way that Deleuze's own avant-gardism-based on an anarchic
faith in the inevitable mutability of all positions and positionings-
leads him to focus on many of the most utopian aspects of Foucault's
thought, the reductive explicitness of much of Deleuze's book allows
us to see many of the logical consequences of a Foucauldian position
with their implications rendered explicit and, I dare say, their problems
made obvious.
Deleuze's Foucault starts like many other studies of Foucault in
arguing that a break occurs around the time of The Archaeology of
Knowledge and The Order of Discourse (the early 1970s) in which a
relatively de-institutionalized study of the internal structures of genres
of discourse gives way to a study of discourse in terms of power. To
be sure, Deleuze does emphasize the ways in which power, even when
unnamed, is essential to Foucault's earlier work (for example, in Mad-
ness and Civilization, which is readable as a study of a dominant
culture's power to construct various representations of, and practices
on, Otherness). But Deleuze tends to follow the standard line in sug-
gesting that an analysis of power does not become systematic in Fou-
cault until his later work. But where most writers on Foucault tend
to read the shift in terms of contingent influences (for example, the
impact of May ~68 on a politicization of French intellectuals), Deleuze
diverges by arguing that a theory of power was necessary to the com-
pletion of the project set out in Foucault's early work: for Deleuze,
108 the later analysis of power is not so much a casting aside of the earlier
work as its necessary rewriting within a new framework that offered
Foucault certain solutions to blockages in the earlier work.
For Deleuze, the early work of Foucault centers on a variable analysis
and synthesis of what Foucault posits as the two fundamental realms
or regimes of human practice: the realm of language and the realm of
light or, in other terms, the order of discourse and the order of vision.
As Deleuze suggests, Foucault works to avoid any conception of seeing
or saying as either arbitrary or subjective (that is, personally willed)
actions, and so he sets out to study the emplacement of each and every
act of sight and statement in their field(s) of possibility, of a regularity
where each new action finds itself inescapably linked to the already
seen, the already said. What organizes both the internal shape of each
of the two regimes and the articulation of possible relationships be-
tween them is the realm of knowledge. As Deleuze explains: "Knowl-
edge in general [savoir] is not science or even a particular corpus of
knowledge [connaissance], but takes as its object the above-defined
multiplicities [that is, the field of individual but regularized acts of
saying or seeing], or rather the precise multiplicity it actually describes,
with all its unique features, places and functions" (p.19). This last
argument is an important one: as Deleuze suggests, knowledge for
Foucault is not some transcendental conceptual array above and be-
yond individual acts; quite the contrary, it is coextensive with those
acts, part of their very being. There is no reason to interpret actions-
to relate them, that is, to some abstract body of beliefs (and here we
might glimpse the beginnings of a whole new way to talk about films
outside of dominant myth-and-theme approaches). Rather, the goal
of analysis should be to examine how each action as a concrete event
is related to other concrete events. Thus, the first pages of Deleuze's
book, which concentrate on Foucault's order of discourse, suggest the
positioning of each and every statement in three different positive
spaces: the collateral space (the space of other statements of the same
type), the correlative space (the space of a statement's connection to
its projected author and its projected referent), the complementary
space (the space of a statement's relationship to non-discursive for-
mations such as economic structures, political events, institutional
practices). In analyzing each of these spaces, Foucault refuses a beforel
after approach which would relate any statement back to some higher
reality from which it would derive its (secondary) existence. One of
Foucault's most important goals in this respect is to get away from
any notion of a transcendental consciousness as source of meaning
(for example, the intentional ego of the creative author which he holds
up to critique in the famous essay, "What is an Author?"). The notion
of correlative space, to take just one example, rejects the traditional 109
chronology by which linguistic creation is seen as deriving from an
author to whom it can be related for full interpretation. Authorship
is instead posited as one of the variable elements that in certain situ-
ations can accompany a statement but in others be absent. For example,
much scientific discourse produces an anonymity of discourse-as we
all remember from Chemistry class, "one" does not bring personal
pronouns into one's lab reports.
But the assemblage of spaces does not lead to an eternally fixed
geometrical arrangement. Beyond the fact that no higher force neces-
sitates that spaces arrange themselves in the particular form that they
take at any moment (so that as M. H. Abrams, to take just one example,
suggests in a traditional way in The Mirror and the Lamp, a whole
series of linguistic terms, poetic images, conceptual apparati, and social
practices condense at the end of the 18th century to construct a new
and Romantic conception of the Author as origin of a literary texr'),
new forces can emerge to change the arrangement of the fields of
discourse. Thus, Foucault's own work can be seen as part of an overall
movement in recent years to think of the Author as something other
than origin. As Deleuze notes, "[Multiplicities] are not just compounds
built up from their coexistence but are inseparable from 'temporal
reactors of derivation'; and when a new formation appears, with new
rules and series, it never comes all at once, in a single phrase or act
of creation, but emerges like a series of 'building blocks', with gaps,
traces and reactivations of former elements that survive under the new
rules.... The theory of divisions is therefore an essential part of the
system" (p.21). Of course, Foucault and Deleuze here are running up
against one of the essential questions of history and system or, in an
older vocabulary, of freedom and necessity: if a system is an organized
space, or series of spaces, how can historical change, a variation of
the already organized and systematized, be possible? If the answer at
the end of Foucault (Deleuze's answer, I would say, more than Fou-
cault's) is the utopian one of faith in the inherently changing nature
of all structures and systems, the early pages suggest a much more
engaged notion of change as the encounter between political activisms
and the fixities of the system. Significantly,Deleuze's own vocabulary
here-which invokes the "beauty" of Foucault's writings, which talks
of Foucault as an "archaeological poet" -tends toward a romantici-
zation of the subversive archivist-of Foucault as a special figure. I
wonder if Deleuze is aware of the irony involved when he follows his
comments on Foucault's analysis of the anonymity of a discursive field
with the declaration that "perhaps these are Foucault's most moving
statements" (p.7).
110 If Deleuze's first chapter suggests the non-arbitrariness of the spatial
organization of history by arguing that every organization is based on
regularity and that every disruption is itself systematic in its re-artic-
ulation of space, the next chapter (on Discipline and Punish) suggests
a very different explanation for the regularity of history. Backingaway
from the first chapter's possible implication that things might be the
way they are simply because that is the way they are, but also possibly
backing away from the related implication that such a state of affairs
makes revolutionary change seem easy, Deleuze now argues that what
brings all the spaces of history together is something quite specific:
power. History is not simply an arrangement of elements; it is a pow-
erful arrangement of elements, supported by strategies of constraint,
exclusion, and controlled production.
Foucault's conception of power diverges in many ways from earlier
approaches. First, power is not proprietary, something possessed by
a group as a function of explicit needs. As Deleuze says, "In brief,
power is not homogeneous but can be defined only by the particular
points through which it passes" (p.2S). Specifically, power is not State
power (or not just state power) but a mobile force that moves between
public and private, individual and group, local and national, in no
single way. This means that Foucault also disavows a notion of power
as a superstructural effect of a more primary force (for example, the
need to extract surplus value, as classic Marxist economics would
argue).
If power is mobile in the sense that it derives from no one source
and belongs to no one group or agent, it is so also in that it goes
beyond the descriptive language of anyone using it. How one describes
one's relation to power may be quite different than the ways that
power works. This gap between words and activities shows up, for
example, in penal practice as Foucault analyzes it in Discipline and
Punish: where the language of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century
liberal theorists of the prison described an increasing liberalism in
prison pracace:::..a supposed liberation from power-Foucault argues
that the new prison and the new discourse on the prison encouraged
dangerous practices of power that were inherent effects of liberalism
and to which liberalism was inevitably blind.
Deleuze argues that there is a visual form of power that exists in a
form different from the form of discourse and which consequently can
only be inaccurately represented by that discourse. For Deleuze, in his
reading of Foucault, vision and language are two irrevocably separate
realms. A particular deployment of power can cause them to operate
in complementary ways, but they can never occupy the same space,
never become a unitary form. As Deleuze says, "[T]he two forms
 continue to come into contact, seep into one another.... There is a 111
mutual presupposition operating between the two forms, yet there is
no common form, no conformity, not even correspondence" (p.33).
In our semiotic (or post-semiotic) age, where we have come to think
of visual forms as discursive (so that we can talk of film texts), Deleuze's
formulation of Foucault may seem intensely radical. However, some
of this radicality may ultimately be less controversial than it would
appear at first glance. Deleuze seems less to be rejecting the possibilities
of a semiotics of the visual (although his two previous books, centered
on cinema, assert problems in film semiotics without really theorizing
what those problems are") than rejecting the collapse of semiotics onto
a linguistics focused on properties of "natural" language. Indeed, Cin-
ema 1: The Movement-Image generates its own array of (Peircean-
inspired) terms for visual signs in an effort to invoke those energies,
forces, and vibrancies that, for Deleuze, take place in images. Of course,
such a project has something necessarily contradictory about it: after
all, Deleuze is using writing to discuss something that he feels is beyond
writing.
What may be most significant for film theory in Deleuze's Foucault-
in the particular "Foucault" that he is constructing for us - is an at-
tempt to come up with a way of writing toward the image without
ignoring its specificity as luminous form, as spectacle. If film presents
the spectacle of what Raymond Bellour terms "the unattainable text,?"
Deleuze is attempting to see if that unattainability can be mediated by
a new form and function of writing.
The first strategy involves an attempt to use poetic language: in
Foucault, but even more so in Deleuze, language strives toward the
imagistic by taking on qualities of poetry- a construction based on
vibrant juxtaposition, a rhythmic outpouring of terms. (See, for ex-
ample, the evocative opening of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.)
Connected to this, Deleuze and Foucault's writing rejects the abstrac-
tions of high philosophy for the description of striking scenes: there
are few openings as unforgettable as Foucault's Discipline and Punish
with its detailed, slow motion torture and execution of a would-be
regicide. If, as Deleuze argues, Foucault is so important for cultural
analysis in our historical moment, this is so because we are living in
an audio-visual age and Foucault's efforts are part of a widespread
attempt to come to grips with the complicated situation of such an
age. In Deleuze's words, "Foucault enters into a logical tradition that
is already well established, one which claims that there is a difference
in nature between statements and descriptions (for example, Russell).
. . . [T]his problem has seen unexpected developments in the novel,
the 'new novel' and then in the cinema" (p.80). Part of.a tradition of
112 analyzing the relationship between words and things (Les Mots et les
choses is the French tide of Foucault's The Order ofThings), Foucault
joins other experimenters in attempting to reconfigure the terms of the
problem. Hence, as Deleuze notes, there was a strong inclination in
Foucault toward the writing of tableau-like scenes: "[V]isibilities, in
the light of historical formations, form scenes which are to the visible
element what a statement is to the sayable or readable. The 'scene'
has always haunted Foucault" (p.80).
While Deleuze tends to be less scenic in Foucault than he has been
in other books" (as in the opening of Anti-Oedipus or the whole of
Kafka with such images as Kafka as a vampire who sends letters to
friends and lovers as a way of sucking their blood at a distance), his
own writing suggests yet another imagistic strategy: namely, the use
of specific words or phrases that intensely invoke visual responses in
the reader. Foucault, in particular, renders language spatial through a
rigorously geographic vocabulary: things are "transversal" or "diag-
onal" or "conjoined" or "adjacent" or "diagrammatic." For Deleuze,
Foucault is less an archivist than a "cartographer"; history forms
"strata"; relations of the internal and the external are to be understood
in terms of a "folding" [plissement] that culminates in a reproduction
of a bizarre diagram from Foucault (p.120).
Another option is to operate a metaphoric mediation of language
and image by suggesting that one is comparable to the other in terms
of certain shared features. Thus, as Deleuze suggests, whatever their
specific articulations of social space, discourse and vision share the
fact that they are both articulations. Just as Foucault rejects a notion
of natural representation that would pre-exist language, so too the
image is not a representation of things, but a constitution of things.
As Deleuze puts it, Foucault opposes the notion of "an original ex-
perience, a first complicity with the world . . . [which] would make
the visible the basis of the articulable (phenomenology; the 'World
speaks', as if visible things already murmured a meaning which our
language had only to take up)" (p.55). Against phenomenology's faith
in bracketing social factors to encourage a vision of the pure inten-
tionality of things in the world, Foucault and Deleuze reject a purity
of vision: with language, vision is always in situations of correlation,
complementarity. A history of modes of seeing is thus possible, some-
thing that Foucault begins in The Birth of the Clinic. In Deleuze's
words, "The Birth of the Clinic could adopt the subtitle: 'An Ar-
chaeology of the Gaze' to the extent that each historical medical for-
mation modulated a first light and constituted a space of visibility for
illness, making symptoms gleam, either like the clinic by unfolding
things in two dimensions, or like pathology by refolding them, using
a third dimension that restores depth to the eye and volume to pain" 113
(p.58).
Such a history, though, could obviously not be the history of the
evolution of pure form for there is no such thing as pure form, but
only historically specific forms in a contingent relationship to other
forms of their moment. The history of the gaze, then, would necessarily
be a history of the Social, of the articulation of arrangements of vision
and bodies in patterns of power. If one cannot say what vision is, one
can at least indicate its relationships to a field of practices. In a sense,
then, there is at least one respect in which we might say that both
Deleuze and Foucault are post-semiotic (at least according to a certain
conception of semiotics). Their concern is not with the production of
signs in the interaction of signifiers and signifieds, but with the trans-
versal production of signs through their interconnection with adjacent
phenomena: other signs (a la Saussure on the differential nature of
language) but also other forms of human practice. Thus, it is wrong
to see Foucault as a historian of periods, summing up and totalizing
a historical moment through a dominant covering metaphor (for ex-
ample, the "disciplinary society") as his early formulation of the ep-
isteme has led many commentators to believe. Far from seeking a
totalizing representation of a moment in a unitary language that would
bring all aspects of that moment under its synoptic sway, Foucault's
history-writing engages in a much more modem practice of history as
a kind of montage where individual elements are brought into dramatic
and productive juxtaposition to allow a re-constellation or re-figu-
ration of standard ways of thinking or seeing. Far from seeking to
render a fact more "complete" by filling in its background, Foucault
is seeking to render the fact strange by putting it in a new space.
Deleuze notes how Foucault's evident reverence for historical work is
involved with a humorous, even camivalesque sense of the historian
as disrupter of traditional modes of analysis (p.62).
And yet, if montage suggests history-writing as a kind of additive
process, Deleuze also argues the enactment in Foucault of a practice
that might almost seem the opposite of addition. If we are in the age
of the audio-visual, rather than the simply discursive, Deleuze argues
that such an age is itself not totalized, a unitary whole, but a site of
contradictions, tensions, irreconcilabilities. The function of a radical
historian, then, might not be to offer a master-narrative that would
subsume all individual elements of the Social within one single con-
ceptual space. Quite the contrary, the historian might work to intensify
differences, to suggest that no easy dialectic can be found for our
historical moment. At the extreme, Deleuze's book suggests, the hyphen
in audio-visual is the mark of a conflict that language could never
114 overcome, being itself only one pole of an irreducible opposition. Thus,
if Deleuze and Foucault's writing seems, on the one hand, to make
gestures toward a verbal rendition of the visual, on the other hand it
also seems to stage the failure of this gesture and thereby to suggest
the doomed fate of any overvaluation of the verbal in an age that
seems driven even more by the visual. Not unpredictably, Deleuze's
most extended study of visual art-an analysis of the paintings of
Francis Bacon written in 1981-is divided into two volumes, one with
Deleuze's writings, the other with reproductions from Bacon, as if the
two orders could come together only by remaining apart. 10
"Foucault is uniquely akin to contemporary film" (p.65). At some
level, Deleuze's conjoining of Foucault with other practices of and on
the audio-visual writes the history of our present in a Foucauldian
way. Deleuze performs on Foucault as Foucault himself performs,
enacting a new sense of the social field by an unexpected conjoining.
There is nothing arbitrary about this conjoining: in the same way that
Deleuze's history in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image of the emergence
of modernist cinema from narrative constraints is echoed at a meta-
theoretical levelwhich argues that a linguistics or narratology of cinema
must give way to a semiotics of visual energy and luminosity, so too
does Foucault suggest a new history of the present in which a number
of practices - among others, new cinema, Foucauldian theory, a post-
subjective pragmatics, a return to Nietzsche, the New Novel-all
emerge as part of the same field of post-subjectivity and of the break-
down of a conception of language as mimetic form, as non-contradicted
form. In his brief comments on the ways that Foucault's investigations
of discourse and vision parallel modern cinema's work on the relations
of sound and image, Deleuze offers the first outline of a theory of
critical engagement with many of today's cultural issues."
And yet to talk of a "general theory" may be to suggest some of
the problems of the Deleuzian conception of Foucault, along with its
promises. For all his radical discontent with the arrangements of our
culture, there is a certain non-concreteness in Deleuze's invocations of
a need to engage with the movements of History. Even Anti-Oedipus,
which brings together capitalism and schizophrenia in its subtitle, tends
to treat the situations of industrial society in the broadest of terms,
never offering a specificanalysis ofpower's strategies. One consequence
in Foucault of this inattention to the operations of a specific historical
arrangement is an intensification in Deleuze of something that a number
of critics have already found in Foucault: a vagueness about the possible
forms of cultural resistance, a vagueness that at the extreme can even
fuel an extension of dominant power.P Deleuze's late discussion in
Foucault of a vitalist faith in the energies of life against all disciplines
and constraints stands beautifully as the most joyous reading of Fou- 115
cault's politics, but it also can suggest how that politics is rooted in
a faith that can only fail in an analysis of any particular situation.
Significantly, such absences and abstractions go hand in hand with
more specific omissions on the part of Foucault or Deleuze. I have
already mentioned, for example, the absence of a theory of textuality
in Foucault, an absence which enables him either to read texts as
documentary representations or as privileged escapes from the limits
of representation. Not unconnected to this is another essential absence
in Foucault: the absence of any theorization of the construction by
discourse of subjectivity. For all his interest in the micro-politics of
power relations, the insinuation of power into all the little places of
human life and human desire, Foucault never seems to have felt the
need for a theory of the subject; indeed, if new critical theory has felt
the need to rethink Freud, it seems as if Foucault never got beyond
thinking of Freud as the worst of power's representatives, one of the
most disciplinary framers of human desire."
Now to argue that Foucault is not concerned with the human subject
may seem to run counter to the explicit analysis of his own theoretical
development that Foucault provides at the beginning of the second
volume of his History of Sexuality. 14 Here, Foucault announces that
he is moving provisionally from an analysis of the institutions of power
to concentrate on another aspect of power: namely, the subjectivities
that are internalizing power through self-fashioning or self-disciplining.
Foucault's announced shift seems in line with a post-Lukacsian tra-
dition that argues that one cannot analyze an effectivity of power if
one does not have a theory of subjective desires that encourage the
subject'S receptiveness to power. Indeed, if the middle of Foucault
takes the theory of the visual to represent an essential step beyond
early Foucault, Deleuze's late chapters seem to take Foucault's late
works to represent an even more essential step in Foucault's elaboration
of the movements of bodies in history. For Deleuze-and here again,
I think we see a mark of anarchism in his theory of power-an emphasis
on the individual as a nodal micro-point in the arrangement of power
also enables an increased emphasis on a resistance to power: "Do not
the changes in capitalism find an unexpected 'encounter' in the slow
emergence of a new Self as a center of resistance?" (p.Ll S).
But Deleuze's particular characterization of this emergence-based
on conceiving the inside and outside of power relations as caught up
in a mobile enfolding-once again seems to trade a specific analysis
of the turns of the subject within that folding for generalities about a
general folding action. Indeed, I would argue that what Foucault gives
us in the emphasis on subjectivity in his last writings is not a theory
116 of the subject, but of subjection, an automatic process by which fully
constituted and non-contradictory subjects are moved and maneuvered
by fullyconstituted and non-contradictory discourses. There is no sense
here of the divided subject that psychoanalytically-inspired critical
theory has suggested may be the best way to imagine the subject: the
subject as a movement, as a historically, psychically, and sexually
variable narrative of tension, fixity and counter-fixity. Seeking to move
his analysis away from the institutions of power, Foucault may ulti-
mately do no more than suggest that the micro-level of the individual
subject is little more than an exact mirroring or reproduction or em-
bodiment of those institutions. As Foucault and Deleuze's writings
suggest, this approach to subjectivity may either lead to a defeatism
in which institutions are massivelyin place and efficient,or to a utopian
optimism that appeals vaguely to an "essential" freedom.
To a certain degree, the vagueness of the analysis brings with it
advantages. Most important, just as Deleuze has described his own
work as a collection of ideas which he breaks out of their original
context to use for his own ends, so too do Deleuze's writings become
critical pre-texts that others can use in their own way. Yet, it can also
mean that what one gets from Deleuze could just as well have been
gotten from other sources that are frequently more specific historically.
This is true, I believe, of one of the most extended attempts to enlist
Deleuze and Guattari's notion of minor literature for an analysis of
woman's art as an art of Otherness, Louis Renza's ~A White Heron'
and the Question of Minor Literature." Renza is well able to use
Deleuze and Guattari as support for a general theory of Otherness,
but they seem to offer him no help in the analysis of the specific
operations of that Otherness in relation to historically concrete con-
structions of sexual difference. The lack of specificityof Deleuze's few
comments on the interconnections between power and sexual differ-
ence seems apparent from a comment contained in a footnote in Fou-
cault: there can be no question of preferring the mobile space of
classical Greek society to ours since "the body and its pleasures in the
Greek view was related to the agonistic relations between free men,
and hence to a 'virile society' that was unisexual and excluded women;
while we are obviously looking here for a different type of relations
that is unique to our own social field" (p.148).
Indeed, at least one writer on Deleuze has suggested that his val-
orization of movement, of nomad heroes, against cultural fixities can
only operate by establishing cultural fixities of its.own: the valorization
of the postmodernist man whose becoming-woman works by judging
the "progress" of that man against a projection of woman based on
the oldest of stereotypes (support and inspiration of the male quest, 117
succoring earth mother)."
All of this is to suggest that we need to be careful about the ways
we accept the theoretical contributions of Deleuze and Foucault. And
I would want to argue that they are contributions that, at some level,
we have to accept. On purely tactical grounds, it is obvious that a
whole series of institutional supports (such as numerous books and
articles, virulent disciples, hagiographic journals like D.C. Berkeley's
Historyofthe Present) are constructing for theory today an inescapable
Foucault-effeet or Foucault-machine that we must theorize and inter-
rogate. But beyond tactics, I think that Foucault's non-repressive hy-
pothesis is one of the most promising notions in critical thought today.
In an age of desire, of what Stephen Heath calls the "sexual fix," and
in relation to our study of a particular social institution, the cinema,
where desire has so often been solicited and institution3llzed- in stars,
in ads, in the very sensual affectivity of the screen speetacle-the idea
of an explosion of desiring languages, rather than their disappearance,
may be a basic concept in the study of the power of cinema. Empha-
sizing the visual, emphasizing the interest of Foucault for understand-
ing our media(ted) culture, Deleuze's Foucault can be an important
aid in our contemporary cultural analysis.

NOTES

1. For an example, see Martin Jay, "In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault
and the Denigration of Vision in 20th Century Thought," ICA Documents
4: Postmodernism (1986), pp.19-25. As is typical of most commentators
on Foucault in relation to vision, Jay concentrates on those texts where
vision is an explicit concern, such as The Birth ofthe Clinic and Discipline
and Punish.
2. One of the first essays on this is Bertrand Augst's "The Order of [Cine-
matographic] Discourse," Discourse 1 (Fall 1979), pp.39-57.
3. Two of the most significantresearch projects in this area have been written
by Richard deCordova (on the rise of the star system) and Lea Jacobs
(on the influence of the Hays Office and censorship strategies on the
production of new film genres). See deCordova, The Emergence of the
Star System in America: An Examination of the Institutional and Ideo-
logical Function of the Star, 1907-1922, UCLA Doctoral Dissertation,
1986; and Jacobs, Reforming the Fallen Woman Cycle: Strategies ofFilm
Censorship in the 1930s, UCLA Doctoral Dissertarion, 1986.
4. It may seem paradoxical to direct this charge against someone whom
118 many critics take as one of our most advanced analysts of discourse. Yet
Foucault rarely provided close readings of specific texts, and in the few
readings he did offer, he tended either to revert to a reflectionist approach
to the text (the text as an expression or function of a power bearing a
full and effective existence outside the text) or to an avant-gardist evo-
cation of certain texts as beyond power, as in an aesthetically transcen-
dental relation to hegemony and control. The first option shows up most
explicitly in his work on a cinema of Popular Memory ("Popular Memory:
An Interview with Cahiers du Cinema," Edinburgh 77 Magazine, trans.
Martin Jordan, 1977, pp.2Q-25), work which Stephen Heath has sharply
and perceptively criticized for its documentary conception of the film text.
See Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1981), pp.236-237. The second option seems to me to run through the
essays on a literature of limits, collected in Donald F. Bouchard, ed.,
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977). As Deleuze himself notes, "What is curious is that Foucault gives
language, in his beautiful analysis of modern literature, a privilege that
he refuses to life and labor" (p.139). There is an excellent analysis of
Foucault's literary avant-gardism in John Rajchman, Michel Foucault:
The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985).
5. I suggest a number of problems with a Foucauldian conception of cultural
power in "Fables of Transgression: the Reading of Politics and the Politics
of Reading in Foucauldian Discourse," boundary 2 10, no. 3 (Spring
1982), pp.361-81.
6. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958).
7. See Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986) and Cinema 2: Elmage-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
8. See Bellour, "The Unattainable Text," Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975),
pp.19-27.
9. Which is not to say that there aren't moments of the scenic in this book:
to take an example chosen at random, to be caught up in the movements
of history is "as Melville said, to be looking for a central room, fearing
all the while that no one is there, that the soul of man will reveal only
an immense and terrifying void" (p.128).
10. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la
difference, 1981).
11. Other writers have suggested that, no matter the intensity of his look at
the past, Foucault is eminently readable as a figure in, and commentator
on, the postmodernist movement of contemporary culture. See, for ex-
ample, Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode ofProduction
versus Mode of Information (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1984).
12. The most infamous of these critiques is Jean Baudrillard, "Forgetting 119
Foucault," trans. Nicole Dufresne, Humanities in Society 3, no. 1 (Winter
1980), pp.87-111.
13. For an excellent analysis of Foucault's reading of Freud, see Jacques
Lagrange, "Versions de la psychanalyse dans Ie texte de Foucault," Psy-
chanalyse al'univers;ee 45 (1987), pp.99-120.
14. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985).
15. Renza, ~A White Heron' and the Question ofMinor Literature (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
16.. For this critique, see Alice Jardine, "Becoming a Body Without Organs:
GillesDeleuzeand His Brothers," Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and
Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp.208-26.