Standing Problems 249The issue of power is crucial here. Power is not overt Hobbesian physical or inten-
tional force or threat. It isnotabout sovereignty, explicit intentional political action,
authority, or law. Law is as much about normalizing behaviour. Government, law,
and punishment in the modern era are thus regarded as but one modality of the
exercise of power. Power isnothoused in any one singular place. Although earlier
forms of power were juridical in character, the more significant power that Fou-
cault sees developing in the modern era bears upon what might conventionally be
called free actions. Both the wielder and the subject of juridical power are imbricated
in this Foucaultian power. Power is seen as constitutive not just prohibitive. It is
also impersonal and flows through or insinuates itself into language, knowledge (in
humanities and natural science), and institutional practices. Just using language is a
way of exercising power. There can be no neutral language—every discourse involves
a perspective. It follows (for both Nietzsche and Foucault) that there can be no truth
outside power (see Foucault 1986c). Knowledge and power cannot be separated—
Foucault in fact preferred the terminology power/knowledge (see Foucault 1980).
There are no standards, such as logic, rationality, clinical excellence, or justice that
are external to conventional perspectives. Nothing stands above power relations, thus
these purported standards are manifestations of or part of power—a power that
regularizes and normalizes behaviour.
A great deal of Foucault’s substantive research work was consequently taken up
with practices—in prisons, hospitals, psychiatry—as manifestations of this imper-
sonal power. Scientific classification itself is also regarded as a mode of manipulation
and normalization. This forms the substance of books such asMadness and Civil-
ization,The Birth of the Clinic, andDiscipline and Punish. Thus, in terms of either
external reason of government, or the purported humanitarian reason of hospitals,
clinics, asylums, and the like, Foucault sees power at work. It is power via routine
regimentation of thought and action. It is not exercised by a subject, it is ‘unowned’
and works at the micro-level. Power might thus be described as a net of normalization,
forging what Foucault referred to as a ‘docile body’. This power extends into our own
purported ‘self-regulation’, for example, of our own dress, eating habits, or sexuality.
What we call sexuality is in fact for Foucault very much the modern invention of cer-
tain discourses. His last work on theHistory of Sexualitywas therefore an attempt to
trace genealogically the emergence of a series of discourses and practices surrounding
sexuality that are involved in making the human subject docile and ‘self-responsible’.
Even the human body is moulded by many discourse regimes. Foucault referred to
this as ‘bio-power’, that is, where the health and welfare of the body are manipulated
by subtle technologies and disciplinary practices.^17
Genealogy therefore plays a crucial role in Foucault’s work. Its central motif is
to ‘show’ the dimensions and extent of such micro-power—the ‘hazardous play of
dominations’. Genealogy in fact charts the emergence of all the diverse disciplines of
power (see Foucault 1986a: 81–3). Genealogy is not interested in politics at a grand
level, that is, in states, sovereigns and the like. It is more interested in the way power
functions effectively at a micro-level—‘governmentality’ asopposedto ‘government’.
It is in this context that Foucault commented that political theory in general ‘has