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

16 Foucault's Discourse
The development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted
the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical fo rm that guar­
anteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by
these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by ail those systems of micro­
power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the
disciplines . And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it
possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, fo r the will of all to form
the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a
guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies . The real, corporal disciplines
constituted the foundation of the formal. juridical liberties. (222)2
Foucault's highly critical stance toward modernity and the Enlightenment
has been debated for decades. His most prominent intellectual adversary,
Jurgen Habermas, also criticized the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment
and its technological domination. But Habermas was not willing to
reject the achievements of the Enlightenment and modernity. Instead, he argued
that Foucault's genealogical method of writing history was constructed
on major gaps and omissions. Why was it that when Foucault spoke of the
reforms of the Enlightenment era in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
he singled out issues such as the problems of the Kantian theory of
morality, the development of a penal justice system, and the formulation
of a utilitarian philosophy, yet failed to discuss in any substantial way the
establishment of constitutional forms of government that transferred state
power "ideologically from the sovereignty of the prince to the sovereignty of
the people" (Habermas 1995, 289)?
Furthermore, why was it that Foucault saw so little importance in those
modern laws in the last two centuries that have significantly expanded civil
liberties for many previously disenfranchised members of society, both women
and minorities? Why did he see such civil codes merely as sources of deception:
"We should not be deceived by all the Constitutions framed throughout
the world since the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised,
a whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these were the forms
that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable" (Foucault 1978a,
144). Habermas conceded that the legal mechanisms that secure freedoms
fo r citizens in the modern welfare state are the same ones that "endanger the
freedom of their presumptive beneficiaries." But he argued that instead of
critically addressing these problems, and building upon the "emancipatory
impulses" of the Enlightenment, Foucault so "levels down the complexity of
modernization" that such differences simply disappear from his fragmentary
archaeological studies (Habermas 1995, 290).