Studying Power/Knowledge Formations: Disciplining Feminism and Beyond

We owe to Michel Foucault an elaboration of the power/knowledge nexus—the many ways that the microtechniques of power and knowledge are intricated in the processes of producing subjects, managing institutions, and proliferating discourses. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1971), he shows us how the practices of partitioning space, seriating time, ordering perception and cognition, and documenting cases in clinics, schools, factories, and prisons simultaneously produced the Western social order and the human sciences. Foucault insisted that he was investigating practices, not institutions, telling an interviewer in 1978 that: In this piece of research [for Discipline and Punish], as in my other earlier work, the target of analysis was not “institutions,” “theories,” or “ideology” but practices—with the aim of grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these types of practices are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances—whatever role these elements may actually play—but, up to a point, possess their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence, and “reason.” It is a question of analyzing a “regime of practices”—practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken-for-granted meet and interconnect.¹