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

22 Foucault's Discourse
he interested in mapping "the destiny of a people." Rather, his or her concern
was with accidents and "minute deviations," with "errors" that gave birth
to the modern axes of power and knowledge ' (81). Thus, in the tradition of
Nietzsche, Foucault called for a different type of history and a break with what
he termed "supra-historical" historiography.
But a closer look at Foucault's genealogical writings suggests that he often
replaced the earlier grand narratives of modernity with his own metanarrative,
a binary construct wherein traditional social orders were privileged
over modern ones. Foucault replaced the liberal, Marxist, and psychoanalytic
historical narratives with a discourse on power, knowledge, and pleasure
(and sometimes resistance), the central axis of which was a binary contrast
or construct between modern and premodern European societies. In each of
his more empirical genealogical explorations, Foucault attempted to show
the process whereby premodern physical forms of restraint and punishment
were replaced by more psychological and discursive modern ones. These new
forms of constraint gave the appearance of being more humane, but were
in fact more pervasive and powerful because they categorized, labeled, diagnosed,
and monitored according to a regimen.
In Madness and Civilization (1961), Foucault argued that in Western Europe
at the time of the Renaissance, madness was a mundane fact of life and
was even endowed with a certain respect. He cited Shakespeare and Cervantes
to show that the insane led ; 'an easy, wandering existence" in the open countryside
or aboard a "ship of fools" (Foucault 1965, 8). Madness assumed a
liminal position in these societies. Sometimes, it became a window to wisdom
and knowledge, giving one a glimpse of another world. Only when he
became mad did Shakespeare's King Lear recognize the true nature of his unkind
daughters and the folly with which he had treated his younger daughter,
Cordelia. Lady Macbeth revealed the truth of her crime when she collapsed
into insanity. At other times, madness was a tragic destiny deserving of our
sympathy, as was the case with Ophelia in Hamlet. In the premodern world,
madness almost always opened a window to the imagination, and the very
"invention of the arts" owed much to the "deranged imagination" of poets,
painters, and musicians (29).
Beginning with the seventeenth century, the insane were incarcerated, tortured,
and tormented. During and after the French Revolution, Foucault argued,
the physical torment lessened but was replaced with a psychological
one. As James Miller notes, for Foucault, the seemingly humane application
of scientific knowledge turned out in fact to be a "subtle and insidious new
form of social control" (1993, 14). In France and England, the mad were
freed from chains and brought into asylums. Foucault had almost no words