foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

The Paradoxical World of Foucault 15
original emphasis). Finally there is the "examination," the highly ritualized
process that rewards the conformists and penalizes the nonconformists. Thus,
modem power operates ostensibly by gathering a body of knowledge about
individuals (students, mental patients, soldiers, prisoners) through which
they are constantly monitored. The system becomes more successful once the
new " disciplinary power" is enforced not only by the teacher, the sergeant, or
the warden, but also by the individual subject, who has internalized it. ,
The purpose of modern power is both to attain "maximum intensity" and
to do so at a minimal cost, in both economic and political terms. The aim is
to aggregate large numbers of individuals in an institution, yet employ such
discreet and invisible methods of control as to arouse "little resistance." In
short, the purpose of the new technology of power is to "increase the docility
and utility of all the elements of the system" (Foucault 1977a, 218). In
most of his writings before 1976, Foucault suggested that there could be no
successful challenge to the unitary, disciplinary power of modernity. Later,
however, his matrix of power was not completely devoid of resistance either,
as is seen in The History of Sexuality, first published in 1976. Since power operates
at the micro levels of society, points of resistance, which "are present
everywhere in the power network" (Foucault 1978a, 95), would also be local,
manifesting themselves in everyday practices. Multiple sites of resistance
could break norms and prevent the creation of hegemonic and homogenized
societies. He referred as well to "a plurality of resistances": "Resistances do
not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or
a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of
power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite" (96; emphasis
added). Two years later, Foucault's writings on Iran focused on the Islarnist
movement, which, as we will see, he was to characterize as an "irreducible"
form of resistance to Western hegemony.
One of Foucault's more provocative challenges to liberalism, and at least
to orthodox Marxism, was his rejection of the emancipatory claims of the Enlightenment.
He argued that the dominant classes of Western societies gradually
abandoned traditional and more violent forms of power, not because
the elites had become more "civilized" and caring but because they had devised
a more subtle "technology of subjection" by the eighteenth century, one
that was more effective and productive than brute punishment. In Foucault's
view, "the 'Enlightenment,' which discovered the liberties, also invented the
disciplines" (1977a, 222). The more egalitarian juridical framework of the
French Revolution masked the more insidious controlling mechanisms that
operated in the factory, the military, the school, and the prison: