Michel Foucault: Law, Power, and Knowledge

Abstract

Michel Foucault's writings challenge dominant approaches to the analysis of law.2 For Foucault, law is neither a condition for the liberation of the individual, nor is it solely the result of class domination. Law cannot be adequately comprehended from the standpoints of subjects of action whether they be based on individualism, class, or gender or from the general structures through which everyday life is produced and experienced. Foucault claimed that liberalism, Marxism, and standpoints rooted in knowing subjects of action are inadequate because they share a 'juridico-discursive model of power'.3 This model limits the analysis of law and power because it formulates them as things that are possessed by agents of action, as repressive, and as centralized in core structures such as legal institutions and the state. By contrast, Foucault conceptualized power as it is exercised, as multiple and decentralized, and as productive of social structures and knowledge. Law is an element in the expansion of power or, more accurately powers. In modern society, law combines with power in various locations in ways that expand patterns of social control, knowledge, and the documentation of individuals for institutionally useful ends. Ultimately, legality and associated techniques of knowledge and control expand to define and to provide empirical knowledge of every aspect, every fibre of society. Most especially, legality combines with other discourses to form the individual as the locus of ever greater networks of administrative control. Foucault's contributions to critical inquiry defy classification. He was very much opposed, for example, to being pigeon-holed as a Marxist or as extending Nietzsche's critique of knowledge despite his acknowledgement of