How well has the work of Michel Foucault worn since his death of an AIDS-related illness in 1984? That is the question raised by the appearance of this volume of scattered writings and interviews, many previously untranslated, on one of his principal concerns: power and power relations.
Not surprisingly, some of the positions he took don't seem as radical and original as they once did: Foucault's debt to Nietzsche has become ever more apparent. Now that Marxism is no longer much of a force, except in a few rarefied academies, Foucault's courageous self-differentiation from the prevailing ideological norms of his day no longer counts for as much. Similarly, the many passages in this volume, in which he is at pains to distinguish his approach from that of structuralism, smack very much of yesterday's battles - there is little risk of such a confusion arising today.
Foucault's main originality was to switch the emphasis of historical studies from movements and economic forces - "events" had already long been set aside - to the people to whom these things happened. He believed that "people" themselves changed as history changed, and that these changes merited a separate study in themselves. For "people" he used the term "subject", and made the subject the basis of all his inquiries.
This inevitably drew upon him accusations of a retreat to bourgeois ideology, but what Foucault meant by "subject" was very different from the bourgeois concept of the individual. The subject was constituted - the outcome of a play of historical forces that determined its formation. State, church, law, education, medicine - all these, and others, were involved in such formation, and each played its specific part.
Foucault is at his most radical - and at his most Nietzschean - in questioning the category of knowledge itself as something pre-existing, ahistorical and timelessly objective. Knowledge also is a force for domination: it is the outcome of conflict and compromise between forces, between rival versions of the world, and that outcome can be a matter of mere chance, he writes in the most substantial piece in this volume, "Truth and Juridical Forms".
This series of lectures is concerned with the history of law, one of Foucault's most abiding concerns. He examines the origins of the concept of the inquiry, making brilliant use of Sophocles' King Oedipus - which is mainly an inquiry, of course - to show how the force of truth, even if it comes from the mouth of a humble shepherd, is enough to overthrow a monarch. He then moves on to the Middle Ages, outlining how the concept of the test, the ordeal, the trial by combat, became dominant in legal proceedings, but did not possess the historical staying power of the inquiry form.
Foucault then shifts gear: analysing the vast extension of the apparatuses of control in the 19th century, he stresses how these became concerned less with the proclamation and upholding of any particular social norms than with the regulating of the behaviour of individuals ever more closely and intensively, all in the interest of the production apparatus. A mass of historical detail is employed for this demonstration. Related pieces in this collection include a discussion of the influence of the "dangerous individual" in the 19th century and a study of the birth of "social medicine" in the 18th.
Foucault's power - or, in the eyes of some, vice - of moving between massive theoretical generalisations and very close historical analysis is very evident in these articles. There are a number of interviews, the most substantial of which, "Interview with Michel Foucault", is unfortunately too rambling to be of much use. Some of the other pieces included are too slight to merit publication in this form - an exception should be made, though, for a crucial article, "The Subject and Power".
Foucault's strengths and weaknesses are in many ways epitomised by the "Truth and Juridical Forms" series. There is, firstly, the very obvious changing of gear when the discussion moves from a consideration of forms of legal trial to the rather different area of penal practice and developments - from crime to punishment, as it were.
The series of lectures does not hang together. Secondly, large historical problems are raised by the earlier part of the discussion. The notion that the "inquiry" form of legal proceeding is the one that historically prevailed is correct for continental jurisprudence, but not true for the Anglo-American model, where the adversarial system obtains. In this system, the question is not so much what is the truth as who is right and who is wrong, a rather different thing. (Indeed, the current difficulty some politicians and others have with tribunals of inquiry here has its origins in this tension between an adversarial system, to which they are accustomed, and the inquiry as a search for truth.)
In this, our system maintains a certain link with the medieval notion of the trial, or disputatio, itself an inheritance from Roman rhetoric and Roman law, a huge area of jurisprudence that goes entirely unmentioned by Foucault. So, how well has this work worn? Sweeping historical generalisations, as manifested in a dubious attachment to the now strongly questioned idea of historical epochs, are perhaps what chiefly undermine an oeuvre that is, in many ways, admirable and original. Much of his work is negative, as is that of most post-structuralists: indeed, his is a rather dark world, in which dominant discourses, power relations and forms of control seem completely to overwhelm the hapless subject. And while one does realise that Foucault is on the side of the angels - that is, of revolution - in this matter, it is hard not to long for some indication of what a possible freedom from or overturning of such forces might mean. But perhaps that is to ask for too much.
Terence Killeen is a literary critic and an Irish Times journalist