by Michael Guest
Copyright © 1996 by Michael
Guest. (Originally published in Central Japan English Studies, English
Literary Society of Japan, Chubu,
Vol. 15 (1996) 55-68.
Foucault frames his essay "What
is an Author?" with a quotation from Beckett: "'What does it matter who
is speaking,' someone said, 'what
does it matter who is speaking'" (Harari 141-60); and Beckett figures
prominently in the seminal post-structuralist
Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, to whom Foucault
acknowledges an extensive debt
in a note to Discipline and Punish. Foucault's essay was the first to
discuss the question of the "non-empirical
author," positing the author as a "way of being within the
discourse" (Eco 46); Beckett's
reflexive thematization of these issues is scrupulous to the point of
obsession. Foucault's quotation
of Beckett refers us to a further theoretical issue, one that is described
succinctly by Jacques Derrida:
"Metaphor is less in the philosophical text [. . .] than the philosophical
text
is within metaphor" (258). Particularly
when considered together, Beckett and Foucault radically
interrogate the "philosophical"
and "literary" genres within which they might be traditionally held to
write;
interrogate, indeed, the status
of these genres in relation to the equally problematical notion of "reality."
The post-structuralist context
of the point of contact between the writer and the philosopher implies
an
affinity, in respect to the primacy
of text and discourse. My paper will trace out some of its contours, while
seeking to avoid the critical
temptation to reduce the "metaphorical" or literary discourse (exemplified
by
Beckett) to the terms of the philosophical
one (Foucault); or to validate one in terms of the other. They
are equally problematical and
paradoxical, existing evidently ungrounded within a field of discourse.
I
wish to observe some cognate themes
and their implications, and to consider their implicit dialogue. A
broad thematic affinity pertains
to the systematic construction of the self-subject by discourse. Beckett
enacts the process textually;
Foucault historicizes it. Foucault describes the process in terms of an
expanding humanistic mythology,
that masks the growth of a complex, self-perpetuating system of power.
Corollaries may be observed, in
turn, within Beckett's writing: such as practices and structures of
surveillance; disciplines imposed
upon the body; and the transformation of the body into a sign-subject
by physical torture.
Let us begin with a rough outline
of one or two of Foucault's ideas. He begins Discipline and Punish with
graphic descriptions of public
tortures and executions conducted in the eighteenth century. He explains
the reason underlying them: by
breaking the law, the criminal has personally offended against the king.
Rectification must be witnessed
in a public ritual: an awe inspiring spectacle of the monarch's power,
unleashed upon the criminal. The
offender's body becomes a sign of this power; the monarch inscribes -
writes - his power upon that body,
for all to read: "[Torture] must mark the victim: it is intended, either
by
the scar it leaves on the body,
or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy
. .
. ; it traces around, or, rather,
on the very body of the condemned man, signs that must not be effaced"
(34). Further, "[It] is the prince
- or at least those to whom he has delegated his force - who seizes upon
the body of the condemned man
and displays it marked, beaten, broken (49). The ritual is the
manifestation of "a policy of
terror: to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the
unrestrained presence of the sovereign"
(49).
Foucault goes on to demonstrate
a historical transformation of the process of social order. The monarch
is removed as the visible origin
of power; but power itself remains as an insidious, self-perpetuating
network (although this is not
to suggest that the monarch invented power to begin with - he himself was
in all probability a function
of it). The necessary nature of power is to mask its workings, in order
to
induce its subjects to conform.
According to Foucault, power's grandest lie is a historical narrative that
incorporates the emergence of
the humanistic disciplines and the enlightenment they purport to foster.
The lie constitutes the fictional
existence of man as we know "him" - humanity as we know it. Foucault
refers to a "new figure which,
under the old name of man, first appeared less than two centuries ago"
(Order of Things 325). We cast
our eyes back in horror at the tortures he describes, because our
subjective identities are the
illusory products of power's lie of humanistic progress.
Strikingly similar themes are central
to Beckett's novel How It Is, a satirical allegory of human progress,
depicting a huge circle of alternating
"torturers" and "victims," crawling perpetually one after the other
through a universal sea of mud.
The torture instills language and identity, by the method of carving
words into the flesh of each victim.
Beckett's allegory refers to the transmission of an individual
conscious identity through time,
as the Word is conveyed from one instantaneous self to the next, as
much as to the idea of a communal
history. The creation of the subjective self is seen as an innately
torturous process; it takes place
in the context of a cycle of power in which all are implicated. The novel
is narrated from a perpetually
fragmenting perspective, that relates a linear chronicle of history as
imagined by these creatures, but
with the understanding that, confined as they are within their own
instantaneous existences in the
mud, they are unable to know concretely that the infinite line of history
is
not, in fact, a cycle. In other
words, there is essentially no human progress beyond the primeval slime,
and the humanistic history is
little more than a fairy tale, at best consoling, at worst delusive. We
should
however, note a significant contrast
with Foucault, in that one of Beckett's perspectives appears to deny
the very possibility of history:
he makes it seem a fallacy, to cast back for origins into a sphere of
representation, from one's blind
entrapment in the instant of present reality. This is a consideration that
requires of Foucault's project
a high degree of methodological originality and sophistication (see for
instance Hoy; Dreyfus and Rabinow).
Foucault upturns commonly held
preconceptions about history and locates man as a function rather than
the originator of history. Power
is seen as the originator - power with intention but without a human
source. While the idea has a ring
of science fiction about it; there is no need to accuse Foucault of
writing any type of fiction rather
philosophy: he admits as much himself, while asserting that this is so
because the institutions do not
yet exist that could validate what he says (Hoy 52). Foucault
distinguishes himself from philosophers
such as Adorno and Derrida, who reinterpret received notions in
similarly paradoxical ways, by
his use of quite ordinary, everyday historical documentation, such as
political and legal ordinances,
institutional timetables and so on, as evidence. He is not writing about
"grand" themes of philosophy,
which have served to condition humanistic self-conceptions, but about
everyday sites of control and
order: prisons, schools, armies, hospitals, factories, human bodies; indeed,
he abandons the traditional philosophical
claim to make serious statements of truth:
Foucault
has already shown that the imperative to use reason to discover
a deep truth about ourselves and our culture is a historical
construction which has to hide its history in order to function as goal
for us. Moreover, the belief that there is a deep truth in the self
leads directly to the application of scientific rationality to the self
and thus to the very normalization one seeks to avoid.
Whenever
he hears talk of meaning and value, of virtue and goodness, he
looks for strategies of domination (Dreyfus and Rabinow 260, 109).
There is a significant comparison
to be drawn here with Beckett, who departs from the idea of literature
as an expression of the "higher"
aspects of human existence, in favour of exploring "impotence and
ignorance . . . that whole zone
of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable
. . ." (Beckett, To Israel Shenker
14).
A fascinating example of Foucault's
technique, and a linchpin for the area of his thought I have
described so far, is his interpretation
of the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham's plans (1791) for the
construction of a "new" style
of prison, which was to be called the "panopticon." Bentham is popularly
conceived as an enlightened reformer
of an inhumanly cruel system of punishment dating from the
middle ages. The panopticon does
not constrain the body with chains, disfigure it, or cast it into the
darkness. Its ostensible purpose
is not annihilation, but rehabilitation, which it undertakes to perform
not
through effects on the body, but
via the operation of knowledge upon the mind and soul.
The panopticon is a "technology
of surveillance" rather than a brutal means of constraint; it relies upon
the clever organization of bodies
in space. Inmates occupy individual cells that are located in a circle
surrounding a central observation
tower. The inmates are unable to communicate with each other; but, lit
from behind, they may all be clearly
observed from the tower: "They are like so many cages, so many
small theatres, in which each
actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible" (Discipline
and Punish 200; my emphasis).
Their behaviour can be monitored and tabulated; they can be organized
into typographies and hierarchies,
and minutely analysed. Thus a form of knowledge will be produced
that is simultaneously a means
to their control. This is the paradigm, Foucault asserts, for the various
institutions of knowledge and
discipline to be found in modern society: isolating man as an object of
study, it is the model for the
human sciences:
The
prison became a sort of permanent observatory that made it possible
to distribute the varieties of vice or weakness . . . A whole corpus of
individualizing knowledge was being organized that took as its field of
reference not so much the crime committed (at least in isolation), but
the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and which
is manifested in his observed everyday conduct. The prison functions in
this as an apparatus of knowledge" (Discipline and Punish 126).
The tower is made in such a way
as to conceal from the inmates whether or not it contains any observers
at
any particular time. The inmates
have always to assume the possibility that they are being watched and behave
accordingly: internalizing this
state of "permanent visibility" (Dreyfus and Rabinow 189) they become their
own
guardians, performing constant
surveillance upon themselves. Foucault believes that the panopticon marks
the
development of a certain kind
of human reality. "We are . . . in the panoptic machine," he writes (Discipline
and Punish 217). The human subject
exists inside the panoptic system, having internalized it in such a way
that it becomes something like
a structure of consciousness. At the same time, the panoptic technology
produces the human being "as a
subject"; subject in both senses, of being a subject to its power, and
of
having a particular kind of subjective
consciousness (Foucault, afterword to Dreyfus and Rabinow 212). We
are in the panopticon and it is
in us: an effect of Foucault's paradoxical thinking is to undermine the
"inside-outside" dualism that
is the basis for the traditional notion of the individual human subject.
Critics have noticed the similarity
of Beckett's Catastrophe (1982) to the panoptic idea (McMullan 27,
Garner 48). Throughout this short
play, a character named Protagonist stands immobile - though by no
physical constraint - on a pedestal,
while a dictatorial theatre director manipulates him, via the actions of
a notebook-carrying assistant,
whom he orders about. Protagonist is in a sense ironically named,
because until the end of the play,
he performs no action by his own motivation. Director's orders, as he
"fine tunes" his production, serve
at first increasingly to expose Protagonist to the theatre lights and
reveal him to the audience. He
has Assistant remove Protagonists's black dressing gown and hat,
uncovering his pyjamas that are
the colour of "ash"; then he has her make notes to "whiten" his
"cranium," hands, and the rest
of his "flesh." Finally, he calls to an offstage technician named Luke
to
reduce the scope of the theatre
lighting in stages, so that the performance for which they are rehearsing
will end with Protagonist's body
having become invisible, while his bowed head will remain floating in
darkness, lit by a spotlight.
The transition from black to white
and the focusing of the theatre lights bespeak the significance Beckett
places upon the gaze. These not
only convey the impression of an intensifying gaze that brings
Protagonist into an increasingly
individualized existence, like the "actors" in Foucault's panopticon, but
they also enable the process as
a reality in the theatre. We are Director's intended audience and we
share the gaze that discerns Protagonist
- that draws him out of the darkness and inscribes him,
shivering and impotent, into consciousness.
It is sometimes pointed out that Beckett's work conforms to
what he once said of James Joyce's:
it is not about something, but rather, "it is that something itself"
("Dante..." 14). In Catastrophe's
transformation of the theatre metaphor, in its critique of the myth of
God, the audience members take
on the role of the gaze of surveillance that assaults and shapes the
image of Protagonist. The gaze
does not ensue from them so much as they occupy a place within it -
inside the space that Beckett
has set aside for the representation of the gaze in the context of his
play.
Thus we observe a distinctly Foucauldian
approach to the paradox of the human subject, particularly in
Beckett's characteristic demonstration
that crucial humanistic elements are artifices.
The gaze is an integral factor
in much of Beckett's later drama, including his Film (1963) and television
dramas, which are, of course,
highly visual forms. The prototype for his dramatic use of the gaze was
the
"play" Breath (1969), only thirty-five
seconds long, that Beckett sent to Kenneth Tynan on a postcard, as
his contribution to Oh! Calcutta!.
In Breath, the stage lights intensify at the same time as the sound of
an
inhalation; there is a pause before
the exhalation is heard, synchronized with the dimming of the lights;
all we see on the stage is some
rubbish. The representation of the breath-pulse of consciousness starts
and ends with the recorded sound
of a "faint, brief cry," reminiscent of Pozzo's comment in Waiting for
Godot: "They give birth astride
of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more"
(Waiting for Godot 89).
Beckett's vision of human existence
confined in a perpetual moment, no more living than not, has a
philosophical affinity with Foucault's
project to write a "history of the present" (Discipline and Punish 31),
to his radical view of historical
time, and as well, to the profound logical problem that Foucault takes
on
when he attempts to write a critique
of power from a position that, it may be argued, is located within
power's regime. How may he unveil
power using power's own discourse, when any statement thus made
could serve only to extend its
domain? For Foucault, knowledge-discourse is immediately power. Many
years ago, Beckett announced an
equivalent aesthetic problem and the same sense of impotence, when
he spoke of an art that might
turn from the "dreary road" of tradition, toward the "expression that there
is
nothing to express, nothing with
which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express,
no desire to express, together
with the obligation to express." ("Tal Coat" 139). We may observe once
again in Breath, as in Catastrophe,
an assault upon the humanistic notion of the subject, as collectively
we inhabit and perform our function
within a purely mechanical representation of a moment of subjective
human consciousness.
We should note, however, that what
I have referred to as Beckett's dramatization of certain ideas, is not
limited to his work for theatre.
His prose has developed, along equally minimalist lines and in opposition
to traditional modes of logic
and grammar, toward a form of writing that involves the reading subject
in
the dramatic enactment of a deconstructing
subjective identity. Beckett conditions the reader to depart
from conventional frameworks,
as though in an irrational attempt to pursue an ever receding
significance. He describes impossible
"inner landscapes," where no sooner is a feature proposed by one
voice than it is refuted by another:
"At the inexistent centre of a formless place" (Ill Seen Ill Said 9); "A
place. Where none. A time when
try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded"
(Worstward Ho 11). Or where our
subjective gaze, our mind's eye, will suddenly, like an absurd surrealist
eyeball, fall into the image it
is trying to discern or produce: "The eye breathes again but not for long.
For slowly it emerges again. Rises
from the floor and slowly up to lose itself in the gloom" (Ill Seen Ill
Said
22), with an effect recalling
Magritte and Redon. (Caws's The Eye in the Text, while overlooking Beckett,
presents an intriguing analysis
of such reflexive figures of perception.) Beckett adopts unconventional
modes of metaphor and grammar
so as to elude the reality of subject and object that narrative and
grammatical conventions themselves
imply.
Beckett uses the processes of writing
to simulate the production of the subjective identity and the world it
represents to itself. He develops
the convention of the omniscient third person narrator to extremes
where it collapses upon itself
in absurdity. In his novel The Lost Ones for instance, the narrator
describes a sealed subterranean
cylinder, occupied by a society of individuals whose existences are
constituted and governed by (Breath-like)
rhythmical patterns of light and darkness, and complex rituals
of movement, which are determined,
in turn, by the geometry of the cylinder. The narrator is like God,
inasmuch as the rules and realities
exist before his gaze and as he articulates or dictates them. The
more complex and precise his definitions
become, the more his dictated order threatens to break down
into chaos and impossibility.
Undermining his attempt to describe the scrupulous logic of the cylinder's
reality, is the implication that
his language must refer to beyond the cylinder - that he himself must exist,
illogically, both inside and outside
its finite reality. Thus his persona cannot be maintained according to
the terms he himself sets, and
he is unmasked as one contrivance of an inhuman intention toward total
control of an infinitely expanding
system. Incidentally, Foucault writes of the importance of geometry to
the production of the individual
and society (see for instance Discipline and Punish 163, 316 n. 12).
Beckett's adherence to the idea
is striking in The Lost Ones, as in the prose works All Strange Away
(1976) and Imagination Dead Imagine
(1966), where an equally impossible omniscient narrator uses
geometry to determine the form
of the human body:
No
way in, go in, measure. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide
the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two
white bodies, each in its semicircle.
Still
on the ground, bent in three, the head against the wall at B, the arse
against the wall at
A, the knees against the wall between B and C, the feet against the wall
between C and A,
that is to say inscribed in the semicircle ACB . . . (Imagination Dead
Imagine 35, 37)
A startling comparison is to be
made with Foucault on official surveillance of a plague-stricken town at
the
end of the seventeenth century:
This
enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the
individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest
movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an
uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which
power is exercised without division, according to a continuous
hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located,
examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead
- all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.
(Discipline and Punish 197)
Confession is a further prominent
thematic affinity. Foucault argues that in rituals of torture and
execution the application of pain
was precisely geared to the production of truth; the victim's confession
under torture served to validate
the written findings of the secret investigations by which he had been
accused (Discipline and Punish
38; and see Dreyfus 145-6). In Foucault's History of Sexuality the theme
is crucial: he proposes the Christian
confessional as a model for the later "explosion" in talk about sex.
Sex comes to be regarded as the
repressed inner truth of the individual; however, the ensuing process
of self-articulation, through
self-examination, questioning and analysis, is really a means by which
power
further refines its enmeshment
of the mind and body, as it pursues and produces the subject at ever
deepening levels, within ever
shrinking spaces on the table of human knowledge.
Beckett's characters are almost
invariably obsessed with producing themselves through the discourse
they utter. In some works the
theme of confession is emphatic. In the play Not I (1972), the main
character, Mouth, is a woman's
mouth, isolated in a small light, with the rest of the actress's body hidden
in darkness; the only other character
is a hooded, priest-like Auditor, who listens in silence. Mouth's
monologue - her existence - gushes
forth, a stream of impressions and recollections, with repeated
allusions to sin, God, punishment
and guilt. She likens her discourse to excreta (". . . nearest lavatory
. .
. start pouring it out . . ."):
it is at essence and origin a tainted organic flow. From a religious viewpoint,
she seems to have fallen into
a purgatorial state as a result of some forgotten or ill defined sin that
it will
take eternity to articulate. However,
the context of Beckett's theatre suggests an ironic interpretation of
the purgatorial scenario, as an
allegory for an immediate state of existence, that coexists beneath,
behind or prior to the illusion
of conscious identity. Our gaze pierces into a primal dimension, where
it
"torment[s]" into existence her
human essence of confessional discourse.
We can trace Beckett's and Foucault's
affinity from their application of similar specific ideas and images
to general philosophical and aesthetic
stances - there are many more specific instances than I am able
to deal with here. We are led
to acknowledge an interplay between the oeuvres that not only contributes
significance to both, but which
appears to open the way to a general critical perspective. We should not
consider that, as a philosopher-historian,
Foucault speaks in a more authoritative voice about something
we should perceive as "reality,"
for it would appear that Beckett has helped inform that reality to an
indeterminate extent; as we have
seen, Foucault is well acquainted with Beckett's pattern of thought (to
say the least; but how could we
ever affirm or deny that the reverse were not equally true?) Rather than
consider traditional terms of
influence, it is more fruitful to think of their writings as converging
independently within the sphere
of a "more real" reality than we are used to have represented to us: in
philosophy, or in art or literature,
or through the manifold systems through which we produce our
workaday world - and have it produced
for us. Foucault's writing can be described as "fiction" to the
extent to which it is accepted
that the interpretative institutions to which he refers are founded on
power's
lies and illusions. Reciprocally,
Beckett's ostensible "fictions" for the stage and page evade conventional
genres of illusory representation,
and focus themselves reflexively upon the processes of production and
reception as they occur within
the reality of the present moment.
It is perhaps true that a Foucauldian
perspective tends to "politicize" Beckett, by subtly re-shading
understated elements that are
implicitly political anyway. Beckett's shadowy wraiths, cringing from the
light of consciousness may merely
be interpreted as the expression of an aberrant existential angst. Who
is to say that the light is not
a "natural" and "normal" mode of existence, rather than an insidious,
disembodied gaze of discourse-power?
Hence, the oeuvre is considered by some to recede into apathy:
as in the opening words from Waiting
for Godot, there is simply "Nothing to be done." We must bear in
mind, however, a familiar charge
against the political Foucault's "inability to ground the resistance to
power which [he claims] to articulate"
(Callinicos 6).
Foucault's response is that, "from
the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one
practical consequence: we have
to create ourselves as a work of art" (qtd. in Dreyfus and Rabinow 237).
Similarly, Beckett's act of writing,
which is at once an act of self-creation, implies a site of resistance
against whatever it is that imposes
the failure and impotence to which he habitually refers. The act of
resistance needs to be an act
of assertion that is not an act of power; hence, for instance, Beckett's
writing speaks only ever of its
own failure, avoiding claims of truth and emancipation. Leo Bursani and
Ulysse Dutiot write of "something
exhilarating in the idea of a joyful self-dismissal giving birth to a new
kind of power" (9); while Foucault
proposes an attitude of "hyperactive pessimism" (qtd. in Dreyfus and
Rabinow 264). The act of resistance
is a free and aesthetic act which aims to produce an alternative
form of subjectivity; but it is
an unverifiable possibility - as unknowable as death. In Catastrophe -
which
is perhaps Beckett's most overtly
political play, dedicated as it was to the then politically imprisoned
Vaclav Havel - Protagonist performs
such an act when, contravening the Director's explicit order, he
raises his head and opens his
eyes to meet the gaze streaming at him from the dark, immediately halting
the recorded audience applause
(which had occurred right on Director's schedule). It is an aesthetic act
in contravention to the established
order; but to speak of an "heroic" act would be to pervert the image
into a grotesque cliché
in Beckettian terms, something tantamount to the "inspirational" figures
of
socialist realism. Beckett rescues
the image from the type of meaning that could be so used as an
instrument of power, and Protagonist's
gaze fades into the dark, a mute gesture in the void.
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Die
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von
den ubrigen
Gestalten der Internierung"
Alan Aycock 'Foucault and internet discourse'
Bacon and Foucault by Peter Muntigl
V. Bell 'Michel Foucault, "Method" from History of Sexuality'
Steven
Best and Douglas Kellner On The History of Sexuality from Postmodern
Theory:
Critical Interrogations (1991)
Max
Borka 'Flirten met Foucault' A review in Dutch of Patricia Duncker
Hallucinating
Foucault.
James
Boyle 'Foucault In Cyberspace Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired
Censors'
Lee-Anne
Broadhead ' "The Art of Punishing" The Research Assessment Exercise
and
the Ritualisation
of Power in Higher Education'
Canguilhem on Foucault (excerpts) University of Chicago Press
Arnold
I. Davidson: Excerpt from "Structures and Strategies of Discourse:
Remarks
Towards
a History of Foucault's Philosophy of Language"
Mathieu Deflem 'Michel Foucault:Power/Knowledge, Society, and Truth'
Discussion papers from the Department of Government Brunel University West London
Olivier Dobel La classification dans Les mots et les choses.
Hubert Dreyfus Lectures about Foucault.
Hubert L. Dreyfus Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices
Cameron
Duff Stepping through the Eye of Power: Foucault, Limits and the
Construction
of Masculinity
Veronique M. Foti Representation Represented: Foucault, Velazquez, Descartes
Foucault: A Lover's Discourse About Madness and the Media
Jane
Fronek 'Sex, Secrets, and Foucault: Rewriting Victorian Sexuality in
Waterland,
Oscar
& Lucinda, and Possession'
Michael Guest 'Beckett and Foucault: Some Affinities'
D.M. Halperin Review of Didier Eribon biography
John Hartmann 'Towards a Post-modern Notion of Self' (honours thesis)
Horus Publications Michel Foucault's Interpretive Analytics
Lars Hubrichl 'In Search of the Author, or Standing up Godot'
Michael
L. Humphries Michel Foucault on Writing and the Self in the Meditations
of
Marcus
Aurelius and Confessions of St. Augustine
Sheila Kunkle 'Psychosis in a Cyberspace Age'.
John Lechte abstracted from Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers Routledge, 1994.
Matthew Levy 'Foucault's Brazil'
Sandra Ansaloni Michel Foucault: la volonta... (II) in italian
James D. Marshall 'Foucault and Neo-Liberalism: Biopower and Busno-Power'
Gary
Marx's home page This site includes a number of articles which make
use of
Foucault's
work
Kevin McDonough 'Overcoming ambivalence about Foucault's relevance for education'
Wendy McElroy Michel Foucault and Pornography
Siobhain
McGovern and Zeine Mottiar Co-Operative Competition: A Foucauldian
Perspective
William J. Mitchell City of Bits Space, Place and the Infobahn
Hart Murphy 'Foucault's Virtual Passion' A Review of James Miller biography
Lawrence Olivier 'Michel Foucault. Ethique et politique'
Frank
Pignatelli Dangers, Possibilities: Ethico-Political Choices In The
Work Of Michel
Foucault
Jenny Pinkus Definition of discourse.
John
Pratt 'Power and Resistance in the Social: The Critical Theory of Michel
Foucault'
Murray
Ross 'It certainly looks like a pipe: Foucault and the California achievement
test'
Francis Schrag 'Why Foucault now?'
Sandra
Ansaloni 'Michel Foucault Il Potere Nell'eta' Moderna e Contemporanea:
Dalla pena di
morte
e le guerre al razzismo di stato' (in italian)
Joshua
Schuster 'Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and
Derrida'
Steven Shaviro 'Doom Patrols'
Charles Shepherdson History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan
Marilyn
B. Skinner Zeus and Leda: The Sexuality Wars in Contemporary Classical
Scholarship
Paul Veyne Excerpt from "The Final Foucault and His Ethics"
John V. Walker Seizing Power: Decadence and Transgression in Foucault and Paglia
Julie
Wallbank "An Unlikely Match? Foucault and the Lone Mother", Law and
Critique
IX/1 (1998),
59-88 An abstract
Dorothy Ellen Wilcox 'Computers and the internet: Listening to girls' voices'