Foucault’s Analytic of Power

Abstract

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault entertains the possibility of ‘archaeologies’ which were not restricted to ‘a certain way of questioning the history of the sciences’ but rather ‘carried out … in the direction of the ethical’ (AK, pp. 192–4). Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality may be located along this ‘ethical’ vector, insofar as the administrative domains investigated in these books tend to be viewed in terms of technical or scientific means serving or failing to serve ethical goals, such as those given in the justifications of imprisonment. Genealogies account for these moral developments in terms of the establishment of new power-relationships. Overarching these ‘genealogies of morals’ are some general points about power as such. One way into Foucault’s conception of power is to ask: what is the burden of this change of direction away from counter-histories of the sciences and towards the ethical? It cannot be purely the focus on power, since two of the archaeologies, Madness and Civilisation and Birth of the Clinic are patently already preoccupied with the relations of knowledge and political administration.