NOTES ON: Deleuze, G.  (1999) Foucault, S. Hand (trans).  London: Continuum

A New Archivist (The Archaeology of Knowledge)

[I have my own naive notes on The Archaeology...  here]

Foucault claims to be a new archivist, not without criticism, and he claims to deal only with statements rather than propositions or phrases.  This helps him to sidestep the usual hierarchies of propositions, and the usual horizontal relationships between phrases.  Instead he pursues a mobile ‘diagonal line’ [a zigzag?] to read statements.  He says his past work can be taken as examples, and provides only one new obscure one, typing the first five letters on the French keyboard (AZERT), and claiming that they represent a statement of alphabetic order for typewriter users.

Foucault says statements are rare, unlike propositions which can be used to express a number of notions including both what is possible and what is real. Conventionally, any rarity of propositions arise from competition between them, so that ‘each phrase remains pregnant with everything left unsaid’ (2), which permits all sorts of interpretation.  Conventionally, propositions can be ordered into hierarchies of abstraction.  Hidden meaning and propositions mean the ability to multiply phrases and propositions.

Statements are rare in a different sense.  ‘Everything in them is real and all reality is manifestly present’ (3).  We compare them using the diagonal line, studying the same sets at different levels and choosing some sets on the same level, ‘unusual movements and bursts of passion’.  Only a few things can be said.  Yet statements are not always original,  but consist of particular elements in particular spaces.  We study the spaces not as sequences but as statistical curves, depending on how regular the statement is, according to the rules governing the particular field which distributes them.  Thus early statements are no more valuable than later ones.  The question of origins is irrelevant, since human subjects and thinkers, or particular ‘ages’ are also irrelevant: different subjects can produce the same statements, and statements themselves become object-like, ‘a stock of provisions’ (4).

The spaces which surround statements are of three kinds:

(A)   Collateral [also adjacent] space, formed from other statements that are part of the same group, and both space and statements are produced by rules of formation—these are not axioms or contexts, although they might refer to axioms.  Language itself produces homogeneity.  However, statements link transversally [the example is how black youth can move between standard English and NNE in Labov’s work, 5].  They can also move ‘from description to observation, or calculation, institution and prescription, and use several systems or languages in the process’, (5) producing a whole family according to rules of change and variation, producing ‘a medium for dispersion and heterogeneity, the very opposite of a homogeneity’ (5).  Each statement is a multiplicity ‘not a structure or a system’, but a discursive formation [same as a family of statements?] produced by lines of variation or field of vectors.  The statement is therefore ‘a primitive function …  the first meaning of the term “regularity’ (6).

(B)   Correlative space.  This relates to the links between statements and their subjects, objects and concepts.  Phrases are always linked to a subject of enunciation, a linguistic ‘I’, but statements refer to intrinsic positions which are variable and are part of the statement—a literary statement refers to an author, but not necessarily a subject, a poster implies a copywriter, and so on.  This is a function derived from the primitive one.  The same statement can imply quite different subject positions, as when a particular phrase is found in common sense, or whether it indexes a particular academic work [there is a reference here to free indirect speech again, ‘where the two different positions occupied by the speaking subject imply one another’ (7).  We would be mistaken to trace these to some primordial ‘I’: they are located instead ‘within a deep anonymous murmur…  without beginning or end’ (7).  Propositions are supposed to have referents, but statements have ‘discursive objects’ originating in the statement and its limits of variation—and this covers all kinds of things including imaginary ones.  Even statements with imaginary objects can link with other statements, for example by the same author, and belong to a family.   A statement is not like the concept, which normally ‘stands as the word’s signified’ (8).  Statements have their own discursive concepts, ‘schemata’ which are linked different systems— for example, medical statements which link different symptoms at any particular stage of discursive formation.  So statements contain their own functions as derivatives, and subject, object and concept are derived functions, distributed in particular families in a correlative space, as particular points, as a matter of regularity.  There is a multiplicity of statements operating on the same principles ‘of an inherent variation and an intrinsic variable’, and this is the basis of a new pragmatics [not all sure why, unless pragmatics here means the actual use of language, something outside the formal logic of propositions or the structures that connect phrases?]

(C)   The complementary space, of non discursive formations which include political events and economic processes.  Statements refer to an ‘institutional milieu’ which form up objects and speaking subjects [eg particular illnesses diagnosed by doctors]. However, it is not the case that discourses symbolize institutions (expression), and nor do institutions determine who may speak (reflection).  The diagonal offers a third possibility of association, where non discursive formations set the limit or horizon within which objects and subjects can appear, acting as a field.  Statements inside those fields can be original or repeated, but they are rare because they need to take into account all sorts of real conditions—the distribution of elements, sequences of places and events, productive links with institutions, and so on.  So a simple statement about evolution can mean one thing in 18^th century history but quite another in 19^th century biology.  Is this just an insistence on context?  Context itself varies according to a discursive formations.  Statements persist and repeat because of this ‘internal materiality’, making it capable of linking with something else—another statement, or a new collection of elements which are given form [and the example again is AZERT, which assumes form only once we make a statement about typewriters, 12].  Statements repeats but they also include small differences, things that are almost identical to them, and this will involve Foucault in a subsequent discussion of power and its relation to knowledge.

In The Order of Things, Foucault continues to explore the notion of the statement and how these lead to the formation of both words and objects.  Examples include early experiences of madness that already implied some propositions about it, and, later, a ‘medical gaze’ which constructed objects.  These particular arguments have been seen as lapses, for example since the gaze assumes a unitary subject.  Nevertheless Archaeology argues that discursive formations are real practices, and not eternal or universal ones [apparently Archaeology ends with an appeal to revolutionary practice, to overcome the existing discourse]

Statements are multiplicities as in Riemann.  The multiple is not a predicate opposed to the one, and is not attributable to a thinking subject.  Multiplicities are rare, composed of particular elements and empty places for subject positions.  They are topological.  Foucault takes a first step towards these notions, and so does Blanchot (14).  The idea of the subject arises if we assume that the life is mostly structured—we feel some spaces where we can be free despite these structures.  However, if historical formations are multiplicities, they do not need to be seen as a dialectic between subjects and structures.  This is where statements can overcome the idea of a propositional axiomatic structure, and replace it with a series of specific concrete contents.  The statement is anonymous, leaving the subject ‘only in the third person, as a derived function’ (15).

Archivists are able to both formalize and interpret, going behind phrases to logical propositions (interpretation), and showing the relationships between different inscriptions (formalization), but also see other connections.  This avoids the polarization between interpretation and formalization, which splits, for example psychoanalysis.  It is hard to avoid such operations, however, even though, Foucault says we must stay with the simple inscription of what is said, ‘the positivity of the dictum’ (15) when we do archaeology, even if we do have to excavate the statement.  Even the gaps in statements arise only because they are dispersed in a family.  We do have to penetrate beneath the phrases and propositions, however, to reveal the multiplicity as a precondition for phrases and propositions,  uncovering the enunciative datum, a  limited collection of sentences.  The archive is a monument not a document [pseud 16]. 

We might begin with phrases and propositions, but they need to be organized first into a corpus, and not one based on a particular writer.  The choice is based on particular functions in situations ‘for example the rules of internment in an asylum or even a prison; disciplinary rules in the army or at school’ (17).  The choice for these criteria become clear in Foucault’s later books, and revolve around the notion of power and resistance. [Could be functionalism equally as well?] This explains the particular phrases and propositions in discussions of sexuality, for example.

So statements are not words, phrases or propositions but formations appearing from the corpus, as a result of change in the subjects and the objects.  This change or dispersion is chronic, despite the coagulating properties of corpuses.  Concrete analysis is required to demonstrate these effects.  Archaeology clearly refers back to the earlier works and reinterprets them, possibly as fiction, the effects of statements, but he also claims that he writes only about the real, that is what is real in statements [real weasels here!].

The work alludes to many multiplicities.  Discursive and non discursive ones, and then whole families or formations within the discursive, and then different kinds of statements representing different thresholds.  Science has achieved the threshold leading to rigorous formalization.  However, it has not left its family behind, showing its ideological functions, for example.  Knowledge in general is less formalized, but it still studies chosen multiplicities: it would be wrong to see these non scientific approaches as somehow an unfinished prototype, and not all formations aim at the same threshold.  There might be aesthetic ones as in literature or painting, or ethical and political thresholds, constructing prohibitions and freedoms, some of which might be able to approach a revolutionary threshold.

So there are multiple registers but specific articulations linked to events and institutions and other practices.  Statements cannot be tracked back to a common denominator or made equivalent directly, hence ‘science and poetry are equal forms of knowledge’ (20) [I know which one I’d prefer!].

What of limits or cut offs to discursive formations?  There is no rigorously logical or formal procedure, but a serial method, seeing different formations as occupying a series, diverging and being redistributed [tautology threatens here too] .  Historians like large periods of time, epistemologists like lots of little divisions.  Neither would agree that history is simply sequential, the unfolding of the subject or consciousness or whatever.  Even those historians have problems explaining specifics.  Discursive formations are never easily separated from their forebears, and ‘no formation provides the model for another’ (22) [having it both ways on the epistemological break issue?].  Again what is required is a mobile diagonal line, a new group of distributions and series which actually exist.

A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish).

[see my own notes here]

The book is supposed to make us laugh at the perversity and cynicism of it all, amidst all the detailed descriptions of the horror.  It is a detailed microphysical analysis of power.  Marx's conception of power was seen as too unified and centralized, not transversal [acknowledged as a Guatarrian term, 24].  The group that Foucault was involved in for prison reform, GIP, tried to keep the analysis to prisons and other local struggles, and this experience led to Discipline.  The full break with Marxist conceptions had to wait until the History of Sexuality, however.

Power is not the property of the ruling class, but more a strategy, exercised through dispositions, tactics and techniques.  This is a functional analysis, producing lots of points of confrontation and specific struggles, not analogous, and not univocal.  Instead of the state as the locus of power, it is rather an effect, so that specific bits of machinery emerge which are later regulated or controlled, or even left to function instead of the state.  There is a lot of discipline in modern societies, but it's not identified with any one apparatus: instead it traverses apparatuses.  Even state apparatuses can develop a kind of [functional autonomy], as when the police develop their own specifics, which can even make them independent from the judiciary and the polity. Prison is also [relatively autonomous] and provides a supplement to the discipline of the state.  When Foucault says power is local, he means it has no global origin and that it is diffused widely.

Economic determinism, even in the last instance, is rejected, and giving the superstructure relative autonomy will not do either.  Instead, 'it is rather the whole economy—for example the workshop of a factory—which these mechanisms of power presuppose' (27).  Relations of power are not exterior, located as superstructures, but have a productive role.  Centres of power and disciplinary techniques are 'characterized by immanence of field without transcendent unification, continuity of line…  Contiguity of parts' (27).  Power has no essence but is operational, or relational, involving both dominated and dominant [almost implying a functional necessity for domination, since the dominated have a role as well].  Power relations are found in 'relations between forces such as "boundary disputes, quarrels between parents and children, domestic tiffs, drunkenness and debauchery, public squabbles and a load of secret affairs"' (28) [power is everywhere—and so nowhere, as Baudrillard puts it in Forget Foucault ].

Power operates through violence and ideology, but neither of these expresses a power relation as ‘relations between force and force, "an action upon an action"' (28).  In disciplinary societies, power allocates, classifies, composes and normalizes.  It produces a reality before it represses one, and thus produces truth before it ideologizes, abstracts or masks' (29).  The work on sexuality shows that classification is a form of power [see my naive notes here].  Repression and ideology presuppose this constructive phase, and only explain the appearance of power struggles.

We can see this in the state's role as developing law.  It does this by structuring and differentiating various 'illegalisms’, and this inevitably leads to loopholes and to lawyers.  The law forbids some, invents others, tolerates some, sometimes openly supports the dominating class, sometimes allows the dominated to find compensation.  Changes in the law create new distributions of the illegal, sometimes because new disciplinary powers emerge, as in the development of the concept delinquency.  It suits ruling classes to assume that the law itself is the only basis of power, hence the emergence of the juridical model, but its strategic elements can never be fully concealed.

 A new political strategy begins to emerge, involving local tactics, and overall strategies to connect things up, rather than developing a strong party to win state power and develop new juridical concepts.  Archaeology provided the first example of this new orientation, with its distinction between different ‘practical formations’, discursive and non discursive (31).

We can understand the new developments by thinking of [Hjemslev on] forms of content and expression.  The prison has a form of content, the prisoner, and this in turn relates back to a completely different ways of making statements—forms of expression.  The two are heterogeneous.  So penal law begins to speak about defending society rather than vengeance, developing a code to associate crimes and punishments, articulating different sorts of criminal materials.  Prison, however displays the crime and the criminal, makes them visible, develops an optical system, seen at its best in Panopticon.

The visible and the articulable are not the same form.  Archaeology talked of the nondisursive as a negative, but the non discursive has a more positive form in Discipline, a form of the visible, how things become visible and apparent, as with the new objects as medicine develops.  Prison has its own statements and regulations, and penal law has its contents such as the new series of offences, and the two forms interact and borrow different sections from each other, but there is no common form.  Archaeology argued that there was no common form behind discourses, but what about external forms?  And on the other hand how do the visible and the articulable interact in different specific cases?

Form both organizes matter and finalizes functions—the physical building and the formalized function of punishment or care.  We can see how these two coadapted by considering pure matter and pure functions in an abstract way.   Foucault for example sees Panopticon as an abstract machine, that ‘passes through every articulable function’ (34), imposing conduct on human multiplicities in general, although it takes a specific form in prisons.  Thus Foucault operates with the term of abstract 'machine', as a map, defined by informal functions and matter [informal here means without specific form?], content and expression, discursive formations and non discursive ones.  The diagram is ‘the spatial temporal multiplicity…  there are as many diagrams as there are social fields in history’ (34), and the whole disciplinary society shows the saturation of social life with diagrams of power, with examples ranging from cordons to control the plague, to expulsions of the contaminated.  There are also intermediary diagrams, such as the Napoleonic variant, where a modern disciplinary function gets merged with the traditional ritual monarchical one.  This capacity shows the diagrams are actually unstable, ‘constantly churning up matter and functions in a way likely to create change’ (35).

Diagrams are constantly evolving, and aim at producing a new reality rather than representing an existing one, producing change by reworking preceding notions of reality and their significations, and releasing points of creativity.  Even ‘primitive’ societies can be seen in this way, for example the gift relation is not fixed in some permanent structure, but is in fact a series of ‘supple and transversal’ networks (37) [as in Bourdieu’s notion of strategy, Deleuze says, and in Leach’s critique of Levi Strauss].  This is how micro relations actually compose the larger unities, as in Tarde, who described minutely small relations such as imitation.

The diagram displays those relations between forces which constitute power—panopticon makes power function.  The diagram maps those microphysical and strategic relations [all the abstract possibilities?].  It is not a transcendent idea or a superstructure, but rather ‘a non unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field’ (37), not acting above or behind concrete assemblages, but within them.

Immanent causes are realized in their effects, and this is what links cause and effect, abstract machine and concrete assemblage.  The relations between forces are virtual, potential, and therefore unstable and vanishing, defining only possibilities, and given form.  Realization is also an integration, an alignment and summary of relations, as when the law integrates illegalisms.  Concrete assemblages like schools or workshops integrate substances and functions, and this also applies to the state.  However, this is not simply a coherent embodiment, but  involves ‘taking diverging paths, splitting into dualisms, and following lines of differentiation’ (37).  Things only get realized through doubling or dissociation, or divergent forms, and this is the origin of the ‘great dualities’ between the social classes or the dominant and the dominated.

Even more complicated, there are two forms of realization, one of expression, one of content, a discursive and non discursive, the visible and the articulable.  The immanent has no form of its own, and this is what explains its differentiated realizations—the diagram gets embodied in both visible and articulable for example, and this ‘crack’ appears in all concrete assemblages (38).

In this way, Foucault can [have it all!].  There is a duality of forms, but they can still have a common immanent cause without form.  The common cause explains the interrelation between the two forms: ‘every mechanism is a mushy mixture of the visible and the articulable’ (38).  This overcomes the apparent early dualism in Foucault, although Deleuze says there was already an implicit notion of multiplicity.  It is wrong to see Foucault as arguing that knowledge consists of linking the visible and the articulable as a result of power, for example, since power implies knowledge, the constitution of a field of knowledge.  This means that knowledge cannot be separated from power.  All knowledge ‘runs from a visible element to an articulable one and vice versa’ (39) and there is no common form or even a correspondence, simply a relation of forces acting transversally, and relying on the duality of forms for realization.  Forms encounter each other, and are required to establish some new necessity.

The concrete forms or concrete machines have two forms in an assemblage, unlike the abstract machine which has no form.  In both cases, ‘the machines are social before being technical’ (39) [in other words technical developments may have their own effects, but they have to be chosen first.  The example is our old favourite case of the stirrup being selected by feudalism.  Foucault apparently says that the rifle was adopted once the army was reorganised into more mobile segments.  The whole thing seems to have inspired DeLanda on the war machine, of course].  The panopticon is equally as important as blast furnaces or steam engines.  Abstract machines have to cross technical thresholds.

Assemblages are neither purely abstract or purely concrete.  Even the most separated concrete assemblages, such as schools and armies ‘communicate within the abstract machine’ (40) so they can share techniques and ideas.  Concrete assemblages invoke abstract machines to different degrees—for example military naval hospitals acted as a crossroads, ‘a medical space which can accommodate the complete diagram’ (41), but this ‘coefficient’ varies from one social field to the next.  Thus prison was relatively isolated when it had no role in fulfilling the diagram of sovereignty, but became much more important when fulfilling the requirement of the diagram of discipline.  As disciplinary societies develop, they find other ways to realize the diagram [as in his work on the society of control?].  The importance of the prison therefore rises and falls to the extent to which it represents the disciplinary diagram, and charting these changes is at the heart of Foucault’s method.

Foucault has a global project, beyond charting the specifics of confinement.  For example he also sees a role for limits on speed and circuitry in unconfined space.  There is a primary function behind confinement, and it would be wrong to see the specifics of confinement as similar.  Prisons are part of a much more broad network that is also found in free areas, so confinement also refers to an outside which is excluded or managed, and where statements or visible things are dispersed.  Deleuze suggests that Foucault only focused on interiors in order to ‘restore words and things to their constitutive exteriority’ (43).

There are different forms of externalities: (a) the outside, the unformed element of forces; (b) the exterior, the area are of concrete assemblages which realize forces; (c) forms of exteriority which are different appearances of the same assemblage.  All these three are thought in the same way.  The main point is that Foucault closes nothing off: the archive is doubled by the diagram; the same forces appear in very different relations; all diagrams include ‘relatively free or unbound points, a point of creativity, change and resistance’ (44) and this explains the succession of diagrams and their interrelation.  In each case, there is a ‘twisting line of the outside, spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic  line that passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent’ (44).  1968 was a particular twist of the line producing a particular definition of writing: ‘to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: “I am a cartographer”’ (44).

Strata or historical formations: the visible and the articulable (knowledge).

Strata are historical formations, ‘positivities or empiricities’ (47). We’re going to use Hjemslev again on contents and expressions, each with their form and substance.  Strata were analyzed in some detail in Discipline, but also in Madness.  From that work emerge the notions of visibilities and statements, the visual and the articulable and their interrelationship.  Each stratum has a different distribution of these two, and visibility can change in style, and statements develop a different system.  The visible becomes ‘forms of self evidence’ (48) [so the empirical does not have to be explained any further?].  Each age has a particular distribution of these two, and this is more important than any sets of ideas, since these are the forms that make things visible.  Foucault’s interrogation of history in these terms is therefore quite new.

Archaeology draws out the implications for method, referring to the articulable and the visible as discursive and non discursive formations, each with their expressions and contents.  However, the statement becomes primary, and the empirical visible bits only appear as a negative, as non discursive formations.  There are discursive relations between the discursive statement and the non discursive domain [very weasily I thought at the time -- I don't think Deleuze does much better below], but Foucault draws back from saying that the non discursive can be reduced to a statement.

Primacy of statements recurs [this time as a denial of the subject].  Foucault rejects his earlier notion of a medical gaze, for example [in Birth] because he sees it as giving too much to phenomenology.  The visible has its own laws, but linked to the dominance of the statement [the actual phrase is the statement’s heautonomy—nice to see it again—the Blackwell Kant Dictionary defines it as:

 Heautonomy is a principle of reflective judgement according to which the subject gives itself a law ‘not to nature (as autonomy), but to itself (as heautonomy), to guide its reflection upon nature’ (CJ Introduction §V). It may be described as ‘the law of the specification of nature’ and is not ‘cognised a priori’ and thus applied to nature in the way of a scientific law. Rather it is a rule used by the judgement in order to facilitate its investigations of nature – ‘finding the universal for the particular presented to it by perception’ – and to relate the universal laws of the understanding with the specific empirical laws of nature.

God knows what this means, but Deleuze goes on to say that statements are valuable because they can be ‘brought to bear on something irreducible’ (50).  The visible has an important part to play in Foucault’s history, and to rely on statements alone would reduce Foucault to analytic philosophy.  Foucault has ‘a passion for seeing’ (50).

In strata we gain a knowledge of both things and grammar, both in the past and in the present.  We do not need phenomenology to grasp the visible, since there are no originary perceptions or experiences.  Instead, knowledge is a mechanism, a  ‘practical assemblage’ (51) of visibilities and articulations.  There is nothing behind it, but there are different thresholds producing different layers, such as thresholds of scientificity, but we should not forget the other thresholds ‘involving ethics, aesthetics, politics etc.’ (51).  Knowledge at these different thresholds provide the unity of the stratum.  Knowledge is produced by practices or positivities, contained beneath thresholds.  This provides Foucault's ‘positivism or pragmatism’ (51) and also his [eclecticism], seeing value in both science and literature.

Referring in the subtitle to words and things ‘should be taken ironically’, since we are interested in forms of expression rather than the linguistic units like word or phrase.  Foucault sees no value in the notion of the signifier, which destroys the reality of the discourse.  It is the statement that interests him, tracing the diagonal line.  We have to ‘break open’ phrases or propositions to get at statements, and to grasp contents, which are not just signifieds or referents.  Visibilities cannot be reduced to qualities or objects, but are better understood as ‘forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle, or shimmer’ (52) [explained a bit better below.  Much of this is developed in the work on Roussel, apparently].  Artists have also seen painting in these terms, revealing the way in which light creates forms and movements. [Optical metaphors were seen as irritating evasions when Marx used them in the Grundrisse, according to Hindess and Hirst]

Extracting statements does not mean unmasking them or uncovering their repression.  In the work on sexuality, Foucault says that certain terms were repressed, but statements of sexuality were always present, and indeed proliferating, so that sex had to be spoken of ad infinitum.  In another example, politics is explicit in its statements, even though these are represented in different words or propositions.  Generally, ‘Each age says everything it can according to the conditions laid down for its statements’ (54). In Madness, philanthropic statements evolved which appeared liberating but which were still constraining.

Statements become readable only in certain conditions of enunciation, an ‘enunciative base’, and take on particular forms of expression, including ones that seem to conceal—both derive from the statement and its conditions, however.  There is therefore ‘a theatre of statements’ (54).

There is no subject of enunciation, since the subject also derives from the statement as a function.  Particular authors simply occupy particular available positions.  Discourse comes first, in the form of ‘an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects’ (55). Language does not begin by invoking persons, since a third person is already implied; language does not derive from some linguistic system or structure, since there is already a given body of specific statements; there is no original experience producing speech as in phenomenology, since this implies that the visible things already have a meaning.  Language appears entire,  meaning that it simply exists, in the utterance of statements.

Foucault wants to avoid abstraction by analyzing specific bodies of words and texts, and the regularities of statements in them.  These will vary historically—for example, in the 19^th century, language ceases to be concerned simply with representative functions and wishes to explore a new mode in literature.  Language in this sense is a form of exteriority, not the product of an inner consciousness.

The same can be said about visibilities—these are also never hidden although they are not immediately apparent, and we will never discover them if we look at specific objects or things, but should look rather at the conditions that make them self evident.  Again this is nothing to do with subjective perceptions, since subjects who see things are already located in places within systems of visibility.  So do we just impose some set of the imaginary values behind systems of perception, as in ‘perceptive themes’ (57)?  Foucault prefers the idea that the visible is produced by distributions of light and dark. Apparently he illustrated this with his comments on Velazquez and Manet, but it’s possible to see this in prison architecture, where panopticon illuminates the cells, but leaves the central tower dark, producing prisoners that are seen and the observer who can see without being seen.  The same argument can applied to non optical machines which also make some things visible and other things less conspicuous.  This is the sense in which we could understand the medical gaze, as a form of visibility making symptoms gleam.  This light again is just present, both absolute and historical, not dependent on the seeing subject nor a visual meaning, but an a priori.  The visible also limits and governs the other senses in particular combinations, such as ‘perception, hearing and touch’ (59).

So visibilities are multisensorial ‘complexes of actions and passions’ (59).  Foucault’s conception is still ‘inseparable from a particular mode…  Historical and epistemological rather than phenomenological’ (59).  Visibilities operate within conditions and thus underpin the immediately visible.  They interact with statements.  They’re not just operative in environments of enclosure—hospitals and prisons reveal ‘an extrinsic function, that of setting one apart and controlling’ (60).

Speaking and seeing are conditions for all ideas and behaviour.  They are real, for example limited to a corpus, they are exterior and historical, not subjective, but they do provide an appearance of receptivity and spontaneity, which in turn can be inhabited by passions, and active relations to [passive] others.

Going back to the relations between them, it is the spontaneity that makes statements appear to be primary [and the receptivity which provides self evidence?].  We can understand their power adaptation by reverting to the notion of content and expression in the different forms.  Foucault does appear to insist that seeing and the irreducible of the visible is ‘a determinable element’.  It is not that statements cause the visible, and nor do they symbolize it.  The object of statements is a discursive one, and not the visible object, although we can theorize the connections ‘in the form of a...dream’ (62).  [Foucault apparently corresponded with Magritte on the non correspondence of text and figure in ‘this is not a pipe’].

In Madness, Foucault argues that the hospital did not originate in statements in medicine, but in the [practices of the?] police, and medicine developed statements outside the hospital system.  In Discipline, the prison does not emerge from the penal law as its expression, but evolves from the more general discourse about discipline, and penal law develops in its own way. Unpredictable effects emerge, so that the prison ends up by displaying delinquents, while the law reproduces prisoners.

So, as usual, there are both non relations between the visual and the articulable, but yet a deeper relation at the same time.  Apparently, procedures for truth, such as inquisitions or scientific examinations, play a key role.  Such procedures are not strictly logical but pragmatic, and depend on what can be seen as well as a method for explaining it.  This raises all sorts of questions about who can occupy a different subject positions and what language they might use.  Foucault argues eventually the truth depends on what is problematized and which practices of seeing and speaking are involved [so there seems to be a pragmatic unity even if philosophically seeing and speaking are separate?].  Thus modern psychiatry problematizes madness, and sees this in the distinctions between speaking and seeing.

However, ‘it is not surprising that the most complete examples of the disjunction between seeing and speaking are to be found in the cinema’ (64) [with examples of the Straubs, Syberberg and Duras.  In the latter, voices evoke one scene, while visual images show another, with ‘a perpetual irrational break’ between the two (65)—yet there is clearly a link between these two at the same time].  The Straubs have the same structure, where differences between the visible and the sayable are substantial and yet they are still linked.  It is not just a matter of subjective belief that the two must be connected, [for philosophers] the issue is that there is an a priori connection of a higher level—‘the unique limit that separates each one is also the common limit that links one to the other, a limit with two irregular faces, a blind word and a mute vision.  Foucault is uniquely akin to contemporary film’ (65).

So does Foucault contradict himself by asserting first that the visual is defined by a syntax, and then that figures and texts are interrelated?  No because there is no isomorphism invoked by either, but an argument that the two forms condition each other, but not in the sense of containing, rather as a form of exteriority [clear as forking mud] (66).  So the visible prison can engender developments in statements, and statements in the penal law can engender visible elements.  The statements and visibilities ‘force’ each other to develop (67), and both speaking and seeing constitute a stratum which can evolve into another one. 

Yet we are still told that the statement has primacy, is apparently spontaneous, while the visible is determined by the conditions of light.  It is the ability of statements to proliferate which gives them a determining effect, and it is this that makes discourse both ‘determining and revelatory’ (67).  This is what makes the visible appear as the negative 'non discursive'.  Yet this still leaves a problem, since statements proliferate endlessly and can overwhelm the visible, ending in language leaving behind objects altogether.  Kant apparently solve the problem by referring to a third agency, the ‘schema  of imagination’.  Foucault needs a third agency as well, and sees this as another dimension, providing the distance across which the visible and the articulable interact…

[A wonderful example of the lunatic attempts by Foucault to have it all ways, just as Deleuze does himself:

‘Between the visible and the articulable we must maintain all the following aspects of the same time: the heterogeneity of the two forms, the different in nature or anisomorphism; a mutual presupposition between the two, or a mutual grappling and capture; the well determined primacy of the one over the other’ 67-68.  You see what a mess you get into if you try to be axiomatic?]

Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)

Foucault begins by defining power as a relation between forces, not a relation between forms and not a form itself.  Forces imply power, not necessarily violence, which is specific and directed and objects rather than other forces.  Force itself is an action on other actions, and it shows itself in matters such as incitement, seduction, enlargement and so on, the categories of power [the full list includes to induce, to make easy or difficult, to make more or less probable, 70].  Discipline also has a list of particular relations between forces, involving distribution in space and time, composition, and so on.

Thus power is not always repressive since it can induce and so on [bit naive – real power is always offered first with an inducement but there is a background threat?].  It is practiced not just possessed.  It involves those who are mastered as well as those who master.  This is ‘a profound Nietzscheanism’ (71).  So we should investigate how power is practiced, how it affects other forces and is affected, both in and active and a reactive form.  The earlier categories of spontaneity and receptivity now mean ‘to affect or to be affected’ (71), in turn a function and a matter of force respectively, at the pure level, but acquiring particular determinations.

So Discipline sees the panopticon as a pure function, affecting taste or conduct in a limited space.  Eventually, it extends into a general form, ‘the pure disciplinary function’ or the diagram, as we saw.  The work on sexuality reveals another function—administering and controlling life in a large multiplicity and an open space [empirical multiplicity here?].  This form of power means making something probable.  Combining these two notions, we have ‘anatomo – politics’ and ‘bio – politics’, relating to unique bodies or populations.

So diagrams present unique relations between forces, shows how power is distributed, both to affect and be affected, and shows how pure functions and unformed pure matter can mix.

We can suggest that there is a difference between power and knowledge like the one between the visible and the articulable.  Again we have radical differences, but also mutual presupposition and capture. The differences arise because power does not pass through form but forces, whereas knowledge works with formed matters and formalized functions.  Knowledge is stratified archivised and relatively rigidly segmented, while power is mobile non-stratified and flexibly segmented.  Power passes through points rather than forms, producing states of local and unstable power.  The diagram also distributes these particular features.

These local unstable points do not have a central origin, like the sovereign, but are mobile, moving across a field of forces.  As a result they are constituted as an anonymous strategy, which evade all stable forms of the visible and articulable.  These relations cannot be known fully, or, in other words, not reduced to a practice of knowledge.  This is what Foucault means by saying that power refers to a micro physics—it’s not just a matter of scale, but another domain, a new dimension of thought which cannot be reduced to knowledge [can’t be generalized or formalized?].  Archaeology studied knowledge, but Discipline and History examine strategic power relations.

Although power and knowledge are different, they often mutually presuppose and capture each other, ‘a mutual immanence’ (74) [here we go, having it both ways again].  For example, human sciences are inseparable from power relations—the latter make them possible and provoke forms of knowledge.  Knowledge can then cross an epistemological threshold, or turn itself into practical knowledge [whereupon it seems autonomous?]. Indeed, human sciences ‘presuppose the diagram of forces on which prison itself depends’ (74).

Relations of forces have to be actualized in forms of knowledge.  This knowledge is not simply the property of a human subject who becomes free from forces, and there is no other exterior influence.  The very combination of power and knowledge has to be done on the basis of their difference.  What happens is that power relations determine particular features, but these are then integrated, aligned and homogenized, put into a series and made to converge.  Again there is no global integration, but ‘a multiplicity of local and partial integrations’ (75).  We can see this with the State.  It is not the only integrating institution—there is the family, religion, production, the marketplace, art and morality.  These institutions do not act as the source of power and again do not have ‘essence nor interiority’ (75).  They are practices, fixing the relations of power.  This is ‘not productive but reproductive’ (75) [not the usual way to read this, although I suppose this means no social reproduction or interior roles or processes].  Together, these make up State control, not the other way about. 

Each historical formation will have institutions with different functions, integrating different power relations, and relating to other institutions.  Institutions may capture each other, but this will vary.  In our era, the State has captured many power relations, but these were produced in the institutional domains.  The State actually implies these institutional power relations.  In our era, institutions have to organise relations between power and government.  They often adopt a molar agent—the Sovereign, the Father, Money, God, Sex.  History shows how the law and sex can become integrated to produce sex as unique and universal, which normalizes desire, although molecular sexuality still persists.

These molar agents or integrations constitute forms of knowledge.  Institutions have two forms or faces as a result of the differences between visibility and articulability, and these are different ways of actualizing, formerly differentiated, to produce elements of receptivity (visible) and spontaneity (articulable).  This is not exactly the same as the ability of power to be affected or to affect, although the former are derived from the latter—in the case of power, receptivity refers to unformed matter, and spontaneity to underformalized functions, while knowledge deals with forms -- substances as visible elements, and formalized functions as spontaneous articulable elements [clear as forking mud and suspiciously definitional and tidy—it all has to work if Foucault is not to appear as contradictory?].

In this way, ‘there is no confusion… between’ those categories of power that refer to incitement or provocation, and those formal categories of knowledge involving education or looking after.  This similarity is not a coincidence [!] and enables integration of power relations through a particular form of knowledge.  Again, sometimes visibilities and statements past through a threshold that turn them into disciplines like politics or economics [Deleuze wonders if visibilities and statements have to proceed at the same rate or extent].

In Archaeology, Foucault talks about regularities of statements, meaning the rules or curves that join individual points.  However, there is another curve, based on some mathematical work (78).  This helps Foucault talk about series which continue until they pass into the neighbourhood of another point, when another series arises.  These series can converge or diverge, belonging to a family or creating another one.  It is the curve describing relations of force which makes the series converge to produce ‘a general line of force’ (78).  Statements act as curves in this sense, which is why they cannot be reduced to phrases or propositions [the example is AZERT again].  Foucault also gets difficult [!] by adding that statements necessarily have specific links with something outside them.

This can’t be a link with the visible.  It must mean that statements join individual points, or actualize relations between forces.  The individual points are outside the statement, even though the statement might resemble them.  Visibilities are external to statements but not outside them in the sense [by definition].  They have their own connections to the outside which they actualize.  [More obsessional stuff]. 

Statements integrate into language, visibilities integrate into light.  This means that light must be comparable to language as a form of spontaneity [but not identical of course].  Together, a light and language can fix relations between forces and regularize them.  Visibilities form scenes, while statements relate to the sayable.  These two forms are heterogeneous, even though Foucault often uses them interchangeably.

We can also see the descriptive scene and the statement curve developed in modern novels and cinema [with some discussion of Foucault on Velazquez—the idea being that paintings are lines of light which become contours and colours].  Visibilities imply statements of capture, and the converse, and this is seen when literary critics discriminate between descriptions and statements [beats me, 81—something to do with statements joining up various discursive objects and subject positions, while descriptions describe the visible and illuminate].

Does power have primacy over knowledge?  Yes in the sense that knowledge integrates forces produced by power relations, but power relations would also fade or remain virtual if they were not integrated by knowledge.  But this necessitates knowledge taking two heterogeneous forms, which are related only through the forces—there is no common form.  Relations between spontaneity and receptivity makes knowledge flow.  Power does not see or speak itself, but its ‘makes us see and speak’ (82). We can see this in Foucault’s work on infamous individuals, criminal existences.  These reveal that seeing and speaking already presuppose and actualize power relations [that is, infamy is not somehow spontaneous or natural?].

Power relations are diffuse and formless.  They designate the other thing to which statements and visibilities refer.  Power itself operates through categories that show the relation between two forces—inciting and so on—but this also produces truth, ‘truth as a problem’ (83).

Foucault’s dualism between the visual and the articulable [must be embarrassing for Deleuze, so he tries to modify it].  Dualism can refer to real differences between two substances, or between two mental faculties, or it can be a provisional stage eventually leading to a monism.  However for Foucault, it is ‘a preliminary distribution operating at the heart of a pluralism’ (83).  In other words, visibility and sayability are respective forms of multiplicities—non-discursive and discursive respectively.  These two multiplicities indicate another one, of relations between forces, which is not dualist.

Discipline constantly shows that dualisms are molar effects occuring within multiplicities.  Dualism simply indexes these multiplicities, so that Foucault’s analyses offer ‘a pragmatics of the multiple’ (84).  The diagram lies behind the archive and behind each historical formation [—we don’t like notions of anything underneath, so we have to refer to this as the outside.  Even so Deleuze weasels horribly here—‘the relations between forces…  do not lie outside strata but form the outside of strata’, meaning, presumably, that forces somehow determine what is outside them?].

Disciplinary societies like ours are channelled through categories of power, controlling populations.  The old sovereign societies have different categories, although these also can be found in the diagram—levying, taking life.  The church had the pastoral diagram, the Greeks and Romans had their own diagrams and so on.  So the diagrams communicate in nonactualized ways, not as strata do [see DeLanda on the 'machinic phylum'].  There is an emergence of forces themselves which envelop history.  Indeed, the diagram is ‘a non place... a place only of mutation’ (85).  Diagrams get actualized in stratified formations, but they also communicate with other diagrammatic states and are outside them in this sense.  The communication operates as ‘a mixture of the aleatory and the dependent’ (86), and we are back to the notion of necessity throwing the dice of chance.  This is what mutation means—no continuity but a rejoining after breaks and discontinuities.

Back to the difference between exteriority and the outside.  The former takes place within a form, such as the form of knowledge with its visible and articulable environments.  The outside relates to force, something irreducible which has no forms.  Particular forces always emerge from the outside.  As it is further away than the external, it ‘henceforth becomes infinitely closer’ (86) [!].  Exterior forms are external to each other in relation to this outside, and it is in this outside that the two forms of knowledge can accord with each other.

Seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, but thinking addresses itself to the outside, the formless and non-stratified, in ‘the disjunction between seeing and speaking’ (87).  This implies that thinking must be deliberate, instead of emerging from some ‘beautiful interiority’, responding to the intrusion of an outside that breaks the unity of the internal.  Interiors feature origins and destinations, and incorporate everything, but going outside is to liberate the forces of the outside, and to regain modification and mutation.  These can only be grasped as dice throws—‘thinking involves throwing the dice’ (87).

So it is not strata are themselves that change but the composing forces, which can relate to other forces from the outside [this takes the form of strategies, apparently].  This is so often misunderstood, however, as in the discussion about ‘the “death of man”’ (87). It  is never a question of real men becoming supermen, and both Foucault and Nietzsche have attracted ‘malevolence and stupidity’ here (88).  The question really concerns the forces that make up human beings and their relation with other forces.  In the classical age, human forces represented God, the finite occupying a place between categories of infinity.  Modern conceptions involve new forces, are not considered as representations of God, but matters that provide organization and production, originating outside the human.

We can imagine another relation where the forces of human beings encounter other forces again, but not to produce either god or modern man.  This would be a death of man, implying a change between human forces and the outside.  Modern man is after all only a temporary construction between the classical past and the future.  The new forces might well be those of information technology and third generation machines, ‘a union with silicon instead of carbon’ (89).

We still need an outside.  The diagram stems from the outside.  The outside always opens to a future, a transformation.  Forces activate the potentiality of the diagram, or appear in the particular form known as resistance.  Indeed, ‘resistance comes first’, since it breaks with the existing relations between the formation and the outside (89).  The very thought of the outside ‘is a thought of resistance’ (90), and so social fields display more resistance than strategies.

Foucault’s politics were opposed by those who saw them as infringing the universal rights of man.  This is but a mask for particular forces and effects.  Foucault sees no universal nature of man.  The universal only appear as in mathematics.  Life produces elements and possibilities, and not man, and life has always been the point, not rights.  And constitutions as representing man are threatened by new vital forces emerging within men and producing new combinations.

There are changes affecting intellectuals as well.  In several interviews, Foucault says that universal individuals have only appeared quite recently, except in the form of intellectuals claiming to speak on behalf of people in general, actually against the position of specialists.  Intellectuals now specialize, but also exchange and produce ‘effects not of universality but of transversality’ (91).  Intellectuals can now participate in current political struggles, since these have also become transversal.  In this way, intellectuals speak for life as well [fantasy].

When bio politics emerges, life also emerges as an object of power, and law ceases to represent sovereign privilege.  However, it produces all sorts of additional classifications, in the name of life or the survival of a population, where outsiders are seen as biological dangers.  So, as ‘the death penalty tends to be abolished…  holocausts grow’ (92).  Resistance to power is also on the side of life, and must turn it back against the system.

So resistance does not depend on upholding man, but should rely on the forces of life.  This is what Nietzsche meant by the superman.  Both bio power and resistance to it turn on the power of life and vitalism.  This is an outside vitalism, admired by Foucault, which resides in human beings themselves, as living beings, freed from outside discipline.

Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)

[This is a difficult section for me, because I haven’t really read Deleuze on Leibniz and the fold yet.  I might have to come back and alter it once I have]

The History of Sexuality seem to end with the notion that everything is a matter of power relations, that life itself inevitably involves a clash with power, or, at best, that power itself always produces resistance.  However, there is still the pessimistic possibility that resistance will become restratified in its own ‘knots of power’ (94), just like the movement for prisoners rights which Foucault got involved in.  Is there any truth outside of power, a truth that can somehow guarantee effective resistance?  Do we find it in going outside of the social altogether, and risking encountering ‘a terrifying void’, which would make all life just a form of slow progressive death [blimey!  I thought I was gloomy!].  Resistance might then become some sort of pointless resistance of death, and everyone fated to meekly take their place in the list of things that are simply waiting to die.

There are other conceptions of death, like that of Bichat, who saw death as coextensive with life and is being made up of ‘a multiplicity of partial and particular deaths’ (95), and this attracted Foucault—the force of life as ‘always thought through and lived out as a multiple death’ (95).

Even so, this implies that life goes on pretty well anonymously until it clashes with power, and often loses and fades.  This provides a kind of infamy, for Foucault, [like a list of tragic heroes railing against power], and Foucault saw himself as one of these—hence the desire, in The Use of Pleasure, ‘“to get free of one’s self”’ (96).

We are so beset by power and penetrated by it, that we encounter it everywhere, and the only alternative seems to be some death-ridden void outside.  Is there any other conception of the outside, one which affirms life?  This might be some ‘third axis’, to add to power and knowledge, and it might be implicated in those two just as they are in each other, although we would first have to establish the separateness of the outside.  Foucault apparently does this in The Use…

So far we have knowledge, sedimented in strata, the diagram or power which describes a relation of forces, and now the outside.  Deleuze says we should think of this as ‘a non relation (Thought)’ (96) [some creative activity not sedimented into knowledge and therefore not subject to power?].  He doesn’t seem to consider the possibility of an inside, mostly because he dismisses interiority [he doesn’t want to analyse interiority, which might involve sociology].  However, there is this mysterious outside which is also an inside but deeper, and an outside further away from the external world [!] [he, or Deleuze on his behalf,  is inventing a concept which will help him retain consistency and tidy up a few loose ends, mostly by being appallingly ambiguous about it?].

This outside is not just a limit, but consists of moving matter, including folds and folding, and these make up an inside—‘the inside of the outside’ (97).  This was first developed in The Order.  [And then a very obscure bit—if thought comes from the outside, why doesn’t the outside simply flood into the inside as an element that cannot be thought, which would lie at the very heart of thought, making such thinking impossible.  WTF?  It might mean that if we saw thought as determined by something from outside, we couldn’t conceive of thought as autonomous and as a way of getting any sort of independent purchase on the inside? It might also mean that things outside are TOO strange and incomprehensible to be managed?].

Classical philosophy had also struggled to depict the ‘unthought of thought’, and had thought of it as a series of folds—labour and language ‘embed’ human beings, but are themselves embedded in living human beings who work or speak, in a fold.  [I still don’t really get this metaphor, I suppose it is something like the more familiar metaphor of having the outside contain an inside—a fold is less deterministic?].  Apparently, The Birth had shown how the clinic allows the body to emerge from the depths, but clinical pathology also discovers deep foldings inside the body which challenge the old simple notion of interiority (97).

So the inside is merely a fold of the outside, as in the often quoted bit of Foucault about the passenger being enfolded in a boat which is itself enfolded in the sea, imprisoning the passenger almost as a condition of his existence in what should be a free medium [does nothing for me, I fear].

Apparently, the theme of the double has also been important, as ‘an interiorization of the outside…   a redoubling of the Other...  A repetition of the Different’ (98).  Apparently, ‘I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the [strange, new] other in me…  It resembles exactly the invagination of a tissue in embryology, or the act of doubling in sewing: twist, fold, stop, and so on’.  Apparently, Archaeology showed how one phrase was the repetition of another, how one statement repeated or doubled something else.  The books on power also showed how forms repeated relations between forces.  The work on Roussel also showed how phrases could be repeated, with minuscule differences between them: these differences or ‘snags’ explains how external things are twisted and doubled, connected.

Roussel also used the term 'doubling' to show how the inside was a folding of a presupposed outside [the only example I can understand is his technique of folding within sentences, by adding parentheses endlessly inside each other].  All this apparently is a way of managing the outside, avoiding its void like nature.  We incorporate the outside but also gain from its new elements.  Somehow, these folding can form an ‘absolute memory’ as a way of managing the outside, avoiding the alternative—death.

The absolute memory is something different from power relations and knowledge.  Foucault saw this in his work on the Greeks and their concern to govern themselves as an essential part of managing estates or participating in city politics.  Governing oneself is not a matter of using existing forms of power or knowledge, but follows from a particular relation to one’s self which is independent and different.  It can be understood as the self folding back on itself, as a form of outside folding back on to the interior of the self, as ‘”a principle of internal regulation”’ (100) [a way of considering the emergence of the reflective self --  instead of a hierarchical I and me, a fold structure, seeing oneself as if one were in the outside?]

In this way, according to Foucault, the Greeks more or less invented doubling, bending the outside back, establishing a relation between the forces of the outside and forces which can affect those forces.  Only free men can dominate others, but first they have to dominate themselves, as a double.  This means in effect the emergence of the self which is not just determined by the moral code in the outside.  Thus the Greeks ‘invented the subject, but only as a derivative of a product of a “subjectivation”’ (101).  The subject then became the free man, living an aesthetic existence.  In this way, there is ‘the dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them’ (101).  This is what makes The Use different—it begins with the Greeks [and is mostly about them, I recall] , and it focuses on a new dimension which cannot be reduced to power or knowledge.  It also breaks with  The History, by raising the question about the relation between sexuality and subjectivation.

Subjectivation, like power, can only be carried out or practised.  Sexuality is a major form of this practice, as is eating, a classic relation between inside and outside [!] The Greeks made the connection again by seeing the female as receptive and the male as active, and this immediately gave sexuality a wider application -- to domestic practices, relations between adults, and erotic practices where adults govern boys so that they can govern themselves.  This made sexuality the main way to practice relations to oneself [on an every day basis?], in the context of power relations and knowledge, including moral knowledge.  Free men are subjected to relations of control independence, on an everyday basis.  But they are also given an identity which they must maintain through self knowledge.  And throughout, sexuality becomes a crucial agency of power and knowledge.

This particular Greek form disappeared, but the notion of free individuality remained, as ‘a relation to oneself which resists codes and powers’, in a way which provides a major basis of resistance to power, one that was certainly important in early Christian resistance.  This relation is continually being recuperated by power and knowledge and must be continually reborn.

Subjectivation is produced by folding of four major kinds: (A) the material part of our bodies is to be enfolded, as in the Christian idea of the flesh and its desires; (B) the relation between forces themselves, ‘bent back’ on each other according to some rule—natural, rational, divine and so on; (C) the fold of knowledge or truth, which relates truth to being, as a subjectivation of knowledge, again taking different historical and social forms; (D) the fold of the outside itself, where a subject hopes for some sort of ‘immortality... freedom or death or detachment’ (104).  These four together constitute subjectivity, although they are variable and produce different modes.  They also ‘operate “beneath the codes and rules” of knowledge and power and are apt to unfold and merge with them’ (105).

Sexuality appears in all these relations.  Whereas the Greeks saw force as having a sexualized active or passive role, the Christian formation is a ‘bisexual structure’ [something to do with new connections between sexuality and the third fold, where truth is folded back into the lover, somehow generating new more general forms of desire, 105].

What about the modern self?  Power has individualized us, and knowledge has become individuated, so that we now are accustomed to the notion of the desiring subject and its activities [‘hermeneutics and codification’].  What remains of subjectivity outside?  Subjects are constantly created as a result of ‘folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend each power’ (105).  There might be some refuge in the body and its pleasures, but certainly not as the Greeks experienced it.  There is a struggle against the ‘two present forms of subjection’—individually resisting power, and attempting to maintain our own identity, appearing as ‘the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis’ (106).

Foucault was working on this in a number of unpublished manuscripts.  His first step, in The Use, was to derive the subject as a function of the outside, not just the statement.  Should this new relation to one’s self be called pleasure or desire?  It is possible that the folding of the outside is unique to western development: the east might relate to the outside ascetically, as ‘a culture of annihilation or an effort to breathe in such a void without any particular production of subjectivity’ (106).

This western development seems to have begun with the Greeks and the notion of free men.  But this is still an analysis of an unusually long time for Foucault—maybe he was arguing that moral matters are still dominated by old beliefs.  However, folding or doubling is also memory, absolute memory, memory of the outside, acting through time.  Absolute memory ‘doubles the present and the outside’ (107), but is also endlessly forgotten and reconstituted, unfolded and folded.  This folding preserves memory and the outside, maintains life against death, necessarily renews life.  Thus Foucault came to think of the outside as not just spatial but temporal, ‘as being time, conditioned by the fold’ (108).

At this point, Foucault has to break with phenomenology, or at least Heidegger’s version of it.  It is a break with intentionality, the idea that consciousness is directed towards things.  It lapses back into psychologism and naturalism, despite its attempts to break with psychologism.  It still depends on a world where there are things, which we can experience in some primitive way, and where we stick with words and phrases, which almost inevitably means a human consciousness.  Phenomenology has not done enough to bracket words and things: it should have progressed to see statements behind words, and visibilities behind things.  Statements and visibilities are not intentional, and do not refer to things, but refer instead to ‘a language-being... a light – being’ (109), and it is an act that keeps them as separate and self sufficient.  All we can apparently say is ‘”there is” light, and “there is” language’, with no intentionality necessary (109). This was already a trend in Heidegger, where intentionality tended to get replaced by Being, and phenomenology led to ontology.  Being [big B] was again folded, with [little b] being.

So the relation between the interior and the exterior, is really a relation between an Outside being folded or doubled by an Inside, a much deeper level.  Intentionality only operates at the specific level, but there is another topological relation between inside and outside.  Roussel develop this argument in a practical version, so did Jarry, and his attempt to surpass metaphysics—both authors have a serious side, even though expressed in ‘a diabolical or phenomenological sense of humour’ (111). [Deleuze has admiring essays on both in Deleuze 1997]

Foucault develops the idea of folding or doubling still further, however [more obscure references to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, 111, apparently turning on an insistence on a split between light and language, two parts of knowledge, which can therefore never be grasped by a single intentionality].  So how does empirical intentionality arise?  [Again approaches by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are summarized and rejected—knowledge and its two dimensions are interlaced, as a strategy, rather than found in one single Being—the ‘hallucinatory theme of Doubles and doubling that transforms any ontology’, 112].  As we saw, it requires a strategic domain of power to perform this interlinking and strategising, again with no primitive experience outside it.  As we also saw, the notion of power and its being introduces the idea of the outside which gives rise to forces, so we are left with a ‘floating line with no contours’ (113), linking power and knowledge, not a single Being.

Ultimately, it is force coming from the outside that explains exteriority, both for each form and for the relation between them, as in Nietzsche's idea of power and the will to power.  Heidegger got to the fixed state of Being ‘too early’, before considering this level of folding forces.  This notion of fold links the outside and inside in a less ambiguous way—it is force which is folding, including folding back on the self to become self action and subjectivity.  The Greeks understood that forces could be bent in the interests of power struggles between free men requiring government, but they did not follow the implication that the outside must be folded itself.  We have come to this notion through exploring the strategic interlocking of power and knowledge, which Deleuze thinks is a better, 'slower', more rigorous way.

What explains the historical dimension to knowledge, power and the self?  They do not ‘set universal conditions’, but take limited local and specific forms, being ‘based on particular features that vary according to each age’ (114).  That includes the formation of the self.  The conditions vary with history, and these forms present themselves in particular historical formations.  In particular, ‘the “I” does not designate a universal but a set of particular positions occupied within a One – One- speaks, One –sees, One confronts, One lives’ (115).  Problematic fields are accessible, but not particular solutions.

‘Finally, it is praxis that constitutes the sole continuity between past and present, or, conversely, the way in which the present explains the past’ (115).  Foucault shows how his historical analysis can be extended into the present, and this has led him to ask about new types of struggle, new functions for intellectuals, new modes of subjectivation.  The events of 1968 showed the importance of these questions: ‘What can I do, What do I know, What am I’—how can we resist, how can we produce a new subjectivity, how ambiguous is this new subjectivity?  It’s more important to ask these questions than demand universal rights—rather everything is variable and varying.

Nevertheless, Foucault is most interested in the conditions, and it is only in this sense that he is an historian.  For example ‘he does not write a history of institutions but of the conditions governing their integration of different relations between forces, at the limits of the social field’ (116), and the same goes for statements and processes of subjectivation.  He finds himself having to address another issue—the history of thought, and how to experiment and problematize, thinking ‘in the space between’ knowledge power and the self.  [Or, in a more pompous sentence ‘thinking makes both seeing and speaking attain their individual limits such that the two are the common limit that both separates and links them’, 116-17].

Thinking introduces a new element [inevitably conceived as ‘a dice throw’], brought in from the outside.  Thinking is not innate nor is it acquired or learned, but rather, as Artaud said it is  ‘”genital”’ [generative?] (117).  It can also be seen as originating from the outside.  This results in a combination of chance and dependency: Foucault thinks the forces themselves can grouped together at random, before they are then regularized by language or by other rules.  This leaves a role for thinking ‘as drawing out particular features; linking events; and on each occasion inventing the series that move from the neighbourhood of one particular feature to the next’ (117).  Thought has to deal with all sorts of features of the outside—some which reinforce power, some which offer resistance, ‘ even some savage features which remain suspended outside [integration]’ (117).

It is hard to see how anything like a binding morality can be constructed from these mixtures, unless we see the outside as the unthought element of thought [!]  Apparently, this helps us construct ‘an inside space that would be completely co-present with the outside space on the line of the fold’ (118) [pure science fiction!].  Apparently, an ethical subject can then emerge [although I am buggered if I can see why—pp. 118-9, apparently as the self meets sexuality—pass].

[Apparently, there is a novelist, called Bely who can help us here, 119 --right, I'll just pop off and read him].  Apparently, we can see the outside as subject to the same kind of self discipline as the inside, if the outside and inside are connected as a fold.  Similarly [!] what is inside can find itself actively able to intervene on the outside, as a way of managing novelty [Deleuze here talks about the way that time works, being condensed in the inner subjective in a way which can help us cope with the future—still incomprehensible to me.  This is workable if we can see the past as active and present, liberating itself from the present: only then can it acts as a guide to the future?] What is outside therefore becomes knowable.

So power and knowledge can be used actively, to research the outside for novelty, and the outside can be a way of 'reassessing the forces established'(120).  In the same critical way, we can use a relation to ourselves to follow a 'the task of calling up and producing new modes of subjectivation’ (120).  Then—whoopee—a scratchy diagram, 120, which actually illustrates a fold as a kind of pocket.

Do you know I think this is actually helpful this time! Why didn't he say he meant a sewn pocket (OK he nearly did above). Now I can see what he means. I can see that the sewing bit is the construction of insititutions that keep the outside at bay. It made me think whether the superego can be seen like that too -- keeping the outside manageable and also repressing the inside. I can see what he means by saying the inside is far more than the usual interior because it has bits of the outside in it. Stone me -- I think I get it!!

Foucault seems to admit that all this is fictional, although Deleuze claims it has produced truth and reality.  The world is made up of archives of strata, and these are divided into the visible and the articulable in each stratum.  Light and language appear as 'two vast environments of exteriority' which contain visibilities and statements (121).  We dive into the strata, cross the surfaces and follow the fissures ‘in order to reach an interior of the world', at the risk of finding only a void.  We attempt to rise above strata to reach an outside which would explain the two forms of knowledge and their relationship—this is implied because we do make the visible communicate with the articulable.

The outside is unformed, a battle zone, turbulent with different relations of forces and points, not solidified or segmented out as in the strata.  There are 'uncertain doubles and partial deaths' (121), and it is here that struggles take place and strategies form up according to a diagram of forces.  The strategy then needs to be fulfilled in the stratum, come to fruition, just as the diagram lies in the archive.  This is realization, 'becoming both integrated and different' (122), and it is this that creates the two heterogeneous forms—statements and visibilities.  The relation between the forces becomes integrated too, acting above the fissure in the strata—this integration both deepens the fissure and bridges it [what else].

Forces come from the outside, something even more remote than a normal conception of the exterior, and this gives forces a particular quality, which might even include resistance and instability as far as the diagram goes.  There are some savage particular features as well which can introduce serious disruption: 'it is like Melville's line, its two ends remain free, which envelops every boat in its complex twists and turns, goes into horrible contortions when that moment comes, and always runs the risk of sweeping someone away with it' (122).  But this is the line of life itself, free of regular combinations of forces.  And [no doubt referring back to the bit I didn't understand] this line produces a calm place in the middle of the fissure.  The frantic speeds in the outside somehow produce normal slow Being, 'life within the folds', something that replaces the dreaded void, offering the possibility of the same kind of mastery that one has developed towards one's self, in an extended form of subjectivation: 'the boat as interior of the exterior' (123).

Appendix: On the Death of Man and Superman

Foucault sees that ‘every form as a compound of relations between forces’ (124).  Some can be seen as belonging to man, but the form of man is not uniquely produced by them.  This means that particular combinations of forces produce different forms in different historical times [I’m not sure if this means really, or in thought].  Certainly, ‘Man has not always existed, and will not exist for ever…  The forces within man must enter into a relation with certain very special forces from the outside’ (124).

In classical thought, particular conceptions of finitude and the infinite dominated.  The idea seems to be that real forces could be seen as having an infinite form once they escaped limitation.  Thus the human capacity to understand [‘conceive’] is limited compared to an infinite understanding.  There is also a notion of the indefinite as the lowest degree of infinity, and 17^th century philosophers tried to order these conceptions, and place finite reality in some sort of overall order.  The forces tending towards infinity come from outside man.  A combination of limited human forces and infinite forces produces ‘not a Man-form but the God-form’ (125).  All forces that could be raised to infinity point to the existence of God: indeed offer a proof of God.

Classical science operated by attempting to find elements or forces that could be developed to an infinite degree, located on some continuum.  This produced a number of general sciences [apparently seeing character as the element of human beings, ‘root’ for languages, and money or land for wealth].  This produced 17th  century sciences of natural history, an analysis of wealth, and a general grammar [where each form was located on a continuum?]

It is this form of science  that led Foucault to identify statements.  According to his archaeology, certain affinities were detectable in classical thought.  This led Foucault to develop new series [categories, classifications] in science.  For example, Lamarck still belongs to classical thought, unlike Darwin, since he still uses the classic notion of the animal series or continuum.  In general, the  ground of classical thought for Foucault consisted of attempts at ‘continual development towards infinity, formation of continuums, and unveiling of scenes: the continual need to unfold and “explain”’ (126).  God appears as the universal explanation and unveiling.  Active thought confines itself to unfolding these series.

In the 19^th century, a different historical formation appeared, in the form of new relations between men and the outside—‘Life, Labour and Language—the triple route of finitude, which will give birth to biology, political economy and linguistics’ (127).  Here, the notion of infinity is replaced by some idea of ‘”constituent finitude”’ [beats me, 127].  A further development noted by Foucault is a notion of the two stages—first, man masters the forces of finitude, as something apparently outside themselves.  In the second stage, it is realized that this knowledge is itself finite.  This is the crucial stage, where the Man-form and not the God form appears [not very different from the standard disenchantment thesis really?].

So, something comes along to disrupt the series or the continuum, and it alludes to a new dimension [it also seems to break the smooth continuity between the finite and the infinite].  An example is the notion that there is some organizing force in living things, which is autonomous.  Adam Smith discovers an abstract notion of work, stripped of any particular quality.  These forces and organizations ‘disengage themselves from quality and reveal instead something that cannot be qualified or represented, death in life, pain and fatigue in work, a stammering or aphasia in language’ (127 – 8) [so these things are no longer seen as a part of divine order?  Another step towards secularization as abstract understandings gradually replace classical notions of connections with God?].

This is the prelude for the emergence of modern sciences, where objects, living things and words are seen to arise from these new dimensions, and can ‘fold back’ on to them.  It is a thoroughly spatio-temporal notion of organization, various programs which can be detected in living organisms or languages [apparently, the organization of language was seen as dependent on some collective will—is this the origin of the collective enunciation?].  Work was seen as depending on specific conditions of production, underpinned by capital for Ricardo, and seeing capital as extorted work for Marx.  Comparative work develops.  Everything can be seen as a fold of these underlying organizations and forces, and this also extends the notion of forces that apparently belong to man.

Biology shows how important the notion of the fold is [and here we find some examples well explained by Delanda in modern embryology, that animal forms have a single organizational programme which involves a literal folding of parts, such as the folding of two parts of the vertebrate spine].  It took Darwin to reinstall the notion of animals unfolding, or folding in different ways in order to gain an advantage in survival.  The notion of a serial or continuum underpinning forms of life is rejected.

[Deleuze says that this leads Foucault to break with Heidegger in favour of Nietzsche and the idea of the dynamism of life—I think, 129].

[This leads to Deleuze thinking again about the notion of the death of God in Nietzsche].  It is really Feuerbach who leads to the death of God —‘since God has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God’ (130).  Nietzsche multiplies this story in different ways, but he is really interested in the death of man, because ‘as long as the God–form functions—then man does not yet exist’ (130).

But the new discovery of the Man-form already incorporates the death of [ the existing notion of] man.  First, man can no longer found his identity in God.  Second, the new Man-form is finite, which ‘places death within man’.  Thirdly, man exists only through the various methods for organizing life, including the expansion of production and the diffusion of forms of language: it follows that to critique knowledge is to threaten the being of man [quite an extraordinarily extreme conclusion in my view, but he knows the period best.  I can see how this would have been a very convenient element of colonialist ideology, justifying colonization as the very expression of life itself.]

These conventional notions of man mean that the death of man is nothing much to grieve over.  The issue is whether human forces can regain a relation with the outside to produce a new form in the future, neither God nor Man but Nietzsche’s superman.  Some potentials for this development can be found in the changing forms of language, biology and work.  The emergence of literature, for example, indicates a new regrouping of language, a new ‘”being of language” beyond whatever it designates and signifies’ (131).  Foucault thinks that life and labour did not follow this path, although Deleuze thinks there are indications that they might.

Biology, for example has become molecular biology, where ‘dispersed life regroups in the genetic code’, while work regroups ‘in third generation machines, cybernetics and information technology’ (131).  These offer new forces with which human forces have to relate in a new way, not by thinking of infinity, but more of ‘an unlimited finity, thereby evoking every situation of force in which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations’, not so much folding and unfolding but developing a superfold.  This can be already detected in ‘the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature “merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity”’ (131).

This is why modern literature is so important.  It develops ‘an atypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such’ [examples include Mallarmé, Artaud, Burroughs, Roussel, Dada's collages].  Apparently, this unlimited finity or superfold is what Nietzsche meant by the eternal return.

New relations with human beings are required, relations with silicon instead of carbon, genetic components instead of the organism, and ‘agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier’ (132).  The double helix is the best known example of the superfold.  The superman would be the compound of human and new forces—‘Man tends to free life labour and language within himself’.  It gives men new power over animals and even inorganic matters.  Above all though, ‘it is man in charge of the being of language’.  Overall, ‘it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms’.

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