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Techn: Research in Philosophy and Technology ISSN: 1091-8264

17:2 (Spring 2014): 274292 DOI: 10.5840/techne201311205

Michel Foucault, Technology,

and Actor-Network Theory

Steve MatthewmanUniversity of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract:While Michel Foucaults significance as a social theorist is undisputed, his

importance as a technological theorist is frequently overlooked. This article considers

the richness and the range of Foucaults technological thinking by surveying his works

and interviews, and by tracking his influence within Actor-Network Theory (ANT).

The argument is made that we will not fully understand Foucault without understand-

ing the central place of technology in his work, and that we will not understand ANT

without understanding Foucault.

Key words:actor-network theory; Foucault; technology; technique

Introducon

Michel Foucault is regarded as an important social theorist, yet rarely is he in-

terpreted as an important technological theorist. Discussions of discipline and

docility, for instance, tend to be abstracted from the very technologies that affordthem. As this article demonstrates, these are failures of exegesis, not emphasis, for

the analyses of Foucault are intimately tied to technological artefacts, techniques,

technical knowledges and forms of organization. Similar claims have already

been made within this journals pages (Gerrie 2003). Jim Gerries article offered

a reading of Foucault as a philosopher of technology. It considered connections

between Foucault, Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. The present article draws

on works that were then unavailable in English to examine Foucaults influence on

one of the dominant paradigms in Science and Technology Studies (STS): Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Here the argument is made that we cannot understand

ANT without understanding Foucault, although the broader argument is that we

cannot fully understand Foucault without understanding the role of technology in

his work. In order to make a case for Foucaults significance as a technological


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The Relationship between Thought Structures and Media Structures 275

thinker we commence by looking at the deployment of technological terms in hiswork, his thoughts on technological innovation and his broadening of the concep-

tual horizons of the technological to include the non-material realm.

Foucaults Technological Terminology

Surveys of Foucaults work show that most of his major concepts are couched in

technological terms. In The Birth of the Clinic(2003a: 89) the medical gazethe

eye that knows and decides, the eye that governsis discussed as the conflation

of political ideology and medical technology, and knowledge and perception arepositioned as technological structures (2003a: 38, 48). Similarly, the hospital is

interpreted as a therapeutic instrument in his lecture entitled The Incorporation

of the Hospital in Modern Technology (Foucault 2007: 141). InDiscipline and

Punish, Foucault (1979: 27, 215, 205, 257, 294) conceives of discipline, panopti-

cism and power as technologies, imprisonment and the transformation of man

as a technical project, and the judges of normality as technicians of behaviour.

What is Enlightenment? discusses the rationalities that inform human action,

what people do and how they do it, as the technological aspect of their exis-tence (Foucault 1984: 46). In Society Must Be Defended Foucault suggests that

discipline is a micropolitical technology of the body based on drill and aimed at

the individual, and biopower is a macropolitical technology of security whose

target is the entire population. Biopower, then, is a regulatory technology of life

(Foucault 2003b: 249). Volume one of The History of Sexuality (1990: 44, 90, 105)

positions health and pathology, the regulation of sex and sexuality and processes

of normalisation and correction as technologies. Governmentality is defined as

contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self(Foucault 1988: 18). Security, Territory, Population sees government, police

and security similarly interpreted as technologies (Foucault 2009: 8, 370, 382).

The modern states art of governmentthe technology of state forcesfinds

legitimacy through two great technological assemblages, the diplomatic-military

system and the police (Foucault 2009: 296). In Technologies of the Self, Foucault

(1988: 154) tells us that technologies like government manifest in three major

forms: as utopian impulse, institutional practice and academic discipline. Indeed,

even when he is not employing the t word, Jim Gerrie (2003) tells us that Fou-caults works are crammed with technological terms and metaphors, The Order of

Things being a case in point.

We might ask ourselves what work technology is doing in Foucaults writ-

ings. Technology is a notoriously elastic category that can be made to stretch to


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276 Techn: Research in Philosophy and Technology

the point of meaninglessness. To counter this, the STS literature defines it in fourways: as objects, activities, knowledge and modes of organisation (MacKenzie

and Wajcman 1985: 3; Winner 1977: 12). Our discussion of Foucault will cover

technology in all of these senses: as objects (in relation to stethoscopes and rifles),

activities (such as disciplinary techniques and other exercises of power), knowl-

edge (particularly medical and penological) and modes of organisation (hospitals

and prisons). It will place particular emphasis, as Foucault does, on technology as

activities, the techniques and practices through which ends are realised, for an on-

going preoccupation of his was the manner in which subjects are transformed intoobjects of knowledge within organisational matrixes. Such is the message of The

Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.Dis-

cipline and Punish and volume one of The History of Sexuality study the technolo-

gies through which human beings are made subjects, while volumes one and two

of The History of Sexuality consider the technologies through which human beings

act upon themselves. Ultimately this is where Foucaults interests lay, not with his-

tories of things, but of the terms, categories, and techniques through which certain

things become at certain times the focus of a whole configuration of discussionand procedure. One might say he offers an historical answer to the philosophical

question as to how such things are constituted (Rajchman 1984: 8).

Having defined technology we now need to say what it actually does. Fou-

cault (1988: 18) provides an answer. There are four types of technology, each with

their own specific functions. They are used by people to comprehend and control

themselves and others. All involve the training and manipulation of individuals,

the generation of particular attitudes and competencies. He tells us that the first

three types were identified by Jrgen Habermas: technologies of production con-cerned with the creation, conversion and control of things; technologies of sign

systems devoted to symbolic communication; and technologies of power which

dominate, objectify and ultimately determine individual behaviour. To these Fou-

cault adds a fourth: technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by

their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their

own bodies and souls, thought, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform

themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfec-

tion, or immortality.Foucault (1988: 19) said that most of his work stressed technologies of

power, but technologies of the self are a necessary complement if one is to com-

prehend the development of the Western subject. For Foucault (1997b: 88), it is

not possible to do a history of subjectivity without reckoning with technology,


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since this project involves histories of care and techniques of the self. In his latercareer Foucault became interested in those ways in which individuals act upon,

and sometimes even dominate, themselves. This has led to standard interpretations

of his work that reinforce the notion that he had an early archaeological period,

a middle genealogical period and a later period detailing the history of subjec-

tivity, involving a broad shift in focus from control to liberation (for example,

see Han 2002). However, the posthumously published lectures at the Collge de

France show a preoccupation with another controlling technology: that of security

(Foucault 2008). Technologies of security are distinguished from technologies ofpower by their focus, which is the population not the individual, by its aims, which

are risk-prevention rather than economic productivity or political compliance, by

its location, which is at the level of the state (for example in demographic data)

rather than within specific institutions like prisons, and by its techniques, which

are regulation-based rather than disciplinary. Irrespective of the emphasis we can

say that Foucault was always concerned with subjectivity and subjection under-

stood through the optic of technology.

Thus far we have built a weak case for Foucault to be considered a theoristof technology of any real import. This will be strengthened by considering his

thoughts on technological innovation, technologies of domination, techniques and

his profound influence upon ANT.

Foucault on Technological Innovaon

The claim for Foucault to be interpreted as a technological theorist has been based

on a reading of his works and the self-assessment of his oeuvre; technology ap-

pears as the conceptual and intellectual framework for his labours. In this sectionwe concretize Foucaults thoughts on the role of technology by considering his

writing on technological innovation. This gives us the opportunity to see the ways

in which technologies (understood as physical objects) transform interpersonal

relations in the case of the stethoscope, and institutional relations in the case of

the rifle. The former technical object can be interpreted as a technology of produc-

tion. As a new diagnostic technology the stethoscope allowed for the creation of

new medical knowledge (helping to transform medicine from a theoretical to a

practical science). It also converted a potentially embarrassing situation into aprofessional medical encounter. The latter technical object, the rifle, is the driver

for changes in the function and staffing of the technological mode of organisation

that is the hospital. The hospital can be interpreted as a technology of power: here

deviants from the norm of good health are categorized and corrected.


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When technological theorists explain the point of technology they routinelyfall back on the explanation of mediation (Verbeek 2005: 114). Technologies me-

diate between the physical world and culture, between matter and meaning. This

meshes with the notion of technologies as agents. We use technology to act on

and in the world, and technologies reciprocate. In other words, we should not

think of technologies as neutral intermediaries interposed between humans and

the physical world, but as fully-blown mediators affecting what it is to be human

in the world. Such a take on technology is typical of Foucault, as Gerrie (2003)

notes: technology is not simply an ethically neutral set of artefacts by which weexercise power over nature, but also a set of structured action by which we also

inevitably exercise power over ourselves. Bruno Latour (1999) argues that tech-

nologies permit mediation in several senses. We will discuss three of relevance to

the stethoscope. First, technologies create new programmes of action, new pos-

sibilities. Second, they provide for new distributed practices, new compositions,

and new associations. Third, technologies delegate. They do the work that humans

would otherwise have to do.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault interprets the humble stethoscope as atonce a scientific, social, and ethical device. Manners and modesty forbade male

doctors placing their ears to the chests of female patients. Moral screening was

necessary. This came about via technical mediation. The stethoscope created per-

sonal distance between doctor and patient. Significantly, it simultaneously per-

mitted unprecedented intimacy. The stethoscope solidified distance, Foucault

observed.

[It] transmits profound and invisible events along a semi-tactile, semi-audi-

tory axis. Instrumental mediation outside the body authorizes a withdrawalthat measures the moral distance involved; the prohibition of physical con-

tact makes it possible to fix the virtual image of what is occurring below the

visible area. For the hidden, the distance of shame is a projection screen.

What one cannotsee is shown in the distance from what one must notsee.

(Foucault 2003a: 164)

Part of the medical gaze, the stethoscope augmented the diagnostic senses as one

of a series of instruments and techniques that made the silent audible, the undetect-

able discernable. The stethoscope tied setting (clinic) to procedure (mediate aus-

cultation). Jonathan Sterne (2001: 116) suggests thinking about it as an artefact

of technique, after all [i]t was designed to operate within the parameters of a set

of social relationships, he writes, and it helped to cement and formalize those


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relations: the doctor-patient relationship, the structure of clinical research andpedagogy, and the industrialization, rationalization and standardization of medi-

cine (along with the improvement of physicians social status). Alan Bleakley and

John Bligh (2009: 371) come to a similar conclusion; such artefacts of technique

were set within a wider architecture that was literal and cognitive: a discrete

physical organization around treating patients that is the clinic (also the teaching

hospital) and a structured way of thinking (in different ways for both doctors and

patients) that is the clinical examination.

Physical technologies could also be the drivers for institutional change. Fou-cault makes what at first seems to be a highly unlikely claim: that the modern

hospital owes its existence to the rifle. A key institution comes about in the form

that we recognize it because of the technological transformation of European

armies. Widespread uptake of rifles increased the training costs of military force.

State budgeting increased accordingly. Long considered liable to be on the front

line of disease, national governments looked to protect their fighting investments.

Hospitals took on a new role. No longer a terminus for the poor the hospital be-

came a place attempting a cure. Shirking, much less desertion should be denied.This necessitated new systems of surveillance and management. Experts required

medical knowledge of both how to cure and when a patient was cured. A political

technology of discipline developed in which doctors replaced priests as experts

and administrators (Foucault 2007: 141). As an example of technological theoris-

ing, this piece seems to fall short of Foucaults usual scholarly standard. Indeed,

the idea that a single artefact on its own could transform an entire mode of organ-

isation smacks of technological determinism. Ordinarily Foucault would position

such technologies as part of a dispositif (see the Foucault/ANT section) includingknowledge, institutional discourses, professional practices and architectural struc-

tures. A rather different reading of the development of hospital and modern medi-

cine is to be found in other works by Foucault (2003a, 1994a). Elsewhere Foucault

does write of the connections between technological invention and institutional

change. InDiscipline and Punish, he argues that new weaponry precipitated new

disciplinary arrangements, just as industrial inventions led to new regimes of order

in the economic realm (Foucault 1979: 138).

Foucault, then, was attuned to instrumental change in the most literal way.New devices could contribute to new practices, new observations, new organisa-

tions and new knowledge, so too could new architectural forms. As with stetho-

scopes, buildings could similarly act as scientific, social and even ethical devices.

While palaces were built to be seen, and fortresses were built to see out, the


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panopticon prison was built to see in. Prisoners were arranged so as to be underconstant surveillance, and they behaved accordingly. He who is subjected to a

field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of

power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself

the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the

principle of his own subjection (Foucault 1979: 20203). Control was embedded

in design. The material structure acted on the prisoners prompting Foucault (1979:

172) to state: Stones can make people docile and knowable. The fundamental

point stressed by Foucault is the intimate connection of technology, understoodin its broad sense as objects, activities, knowledge and modes of organisation, to

power.

Panopcism: A Technical Soluon to a Technical Problem

InDiscipline and Punish, Foucault offers an extended analysis of a new technol-

ogy of power made famous through the principle of panopticism. He identifies

this as a technical mutation in power relations commencing at the onset of the

nineteenth century (Foucault 1979: 257). The mutation concerns transformationsin social control from public punishment of the body to private punishment of the

mind and soul. Prisons became the new penalty for transgression. Direct physi-

cal force diminished. Training replaced torture. Instead, a regimen of rules and

regulations covering every facet of existence, the development of detailed records,

individual dossiers, new classificatory systems and timetables dictating activities

to be undertaken. All conduct was to be underpinned by constant supervision.

In the executioners place a whole army of technicians (Foucault 1979: 11):

bureaucrats, chaplains, doctors, psychiatrists and warders. This new form of socialcontrol was defined by the twin processes of carceralization and medicalization.

In his lecture on The Punitive Society, Foucault accounts for these trans-

formations thus:

What brought the great renewal of the epoch into play was a problem of

bodies and materiality, a question of physics: a new form of materiality

taken by the productive apparatus, a new type of contact between that appa-

ratus and the individual who makes it function; new requirements imposed

on individuals as productive forces. (Foucault 1997a: 34)

This new physics of power developed simultaneously with modern state

structures. It involved a new optics, mechanics and physiology. Foucault (1997a:

35) tells us that the new optics refers to continual surveillance. Everything is seen,


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recorded and filed. He calls this panopticism. The mechanics concerns confine-ment. Closed systems can be interpreted as warehouses for surplus humanity, con-

taining those considered useless or threatening to the social order. Individuals are

isolated and regrouped to maximize bodily utility, in short, the putting into place

of a whole discipline of life, time, and energies (Foucault 1997a: 35). Physiol-

ogy refers to standards, their clinical enforcement, and measures of correction

whether curative or punitive. In appearance, it is merely the technical solution of

a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges (Foucault

1979: 216).Mark Kelly (2009: 4344) writes that [t]he key thing about technologies of

power is that they are technologies, not merely structures or discourses of power,

although structures and discourses play their part. That they are technologies

means that they are, like other technologies, a body of technical knowledge and

practices, a raft of techniques, which are transferable. Discipline and Punishis

therefore about more than prisons. Foucault (1979: 205) made it clear that panop-

ticism was a generalizable principle. Such is the architecture that would operate

to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their con-duct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them,

to alter them (Foucault 1979: 172). These disciplinary structures and practices

occupy central positions in modern life.

For Foucault the industrial take-off of the West required the accumulation of

people as well as capital. The development of industrial capitalism could not be

realised without the proper control of people within the political apparatus. The

Industrial Revolution was therefore also a political revolution, resting on a cal-

culated technology of subjection (Foucault 1979: 221). This Foucault ascribedto a commingling of technological innovations, an enhanced division of labour

and new techniques of discipline, with discipline being those techniques by which

bodies are transformed into productive entities. His discussion makes it plain that

power is neither property nor capacity. Power is a relation, an accomplishment

actualized by techniques.

Foucault and the Mechanisms of Power: The Mediang Role of Techniques

Latour (1988: 199) registers his objection to dominant conceptions of technol-ogy thus: The word technology is unsatisfactory because it has been limited

for too long to the study of those lines of force that take the form of nuts and

bolts. This aligns with Foucault (2000: 364): A very narrow meaning is given to

technology: one thinks of hard technology, the technology of wood, of fire, of


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electricity. Even within the field of Latours labours, STS, there is an obsessionwith physical things from Michel Callons (1986a) electric car, to Latours (1996)

automated commuter system, to John Laws (2000) aircraft, Donald MacKenzies

(1990) missile guidance system, Wiebe Bijkers (1995) bikes and Bakelite, and

Trevor Pinch and Frank Troccos (2002) synthesiser. With the growing salience of

material culture across increasing disciplinary domains this trend has intensified.

Once we wrote of the linguistic turn. Jonathan Sterne (2003: 367) believes that

we may now be undergoing an even larger technological turn in the human

sciences, while Steven Connor (2008) has identified a thingly turn in philoso-phy and cultural studies and Judy Wajcman (2002: 361) has noted the increasing

salience of material culture in social anthropology. This gives nuts and bolts

technology more importance, but leaves techniques untouched.

Things enjoy prestige value, but techniques have pariah status. They have

received especially poor treatment at the hands of scholars (Lemonnier 1993: 2).

Yet for Pierre Lemonnier it is precisely these techniques which beg our analysis

for they are unambiguously social productions. Other theorists are wont to go

much further; these are the social productions that produce us (Serres 1982: 91).Foucault would doubtless assent. It is to techniques that he is routinely drawn;

alerting us to this vitally important yet customarily overlooked subject (Discipline

and Punish mentions techniques on ninety-six separate occasions, and Security,

Territory, Populationeighty). Indeed, Latour (2005: 76) accords Foucault now

classical status for his work in materialising non-material technologies, intellec-

tual technologies included. In a scholarly universe now fixated on things, Foucault

returns us to one of technologys forgotten domains; the scholarly blind spot of

technique (see also Gerrie 2003).Can techniques be as significant as things? Can we compare disciplinary

techniques with technological marvels like the steam train and the microscope?

On this issue Foucault (1979: 225) wavers: They are much less, and yet, in a way,

they are much more. The disciplinary techniques of panopticism have garnered

far less attention than physical objects like blast furnaces and steam engines (Fou-

cault 1979: 224). This is regrettable as they represent a veritable technological

take-off in the productivity of power (Foucault 1980: 119):

We frequently speak of the technical inventions of the seventeenth cen-

turychemical, metallurgical technologyyet we do not mention the

technical invention of this new form of governing man, controlling his mul-

tiplicity, utilizing him to the maximum, and improving the products of his


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labour, of his activities thanks to a system of power which permits control-ling them. (Foucault 2007: 146)

Herein lays the crucial point. In Foucaults telling, prior academic accounts of

power fixated on those who were said to hold it, an endless procession of mon-

archs and generals. Scholars either studied great individuals or great institutions;

the exercise of power was seldom discussed, much less the mutual imbrications

of knowledge and power (Foucault 1980: 51). It is to these very mechanisms and

techniques that Foucault (2003b; 2009: 150) routinely turned. As he put it: The

case of the penal system convinced me that the question of power needed to be

formulated not so much in terms of justice as in those of technology (Foucault

1980: 184).

Discipline and Punish identifies the methods through which subjects are ren-

dered docile by the exercise of disciplinary power (Foucault 1979: 138). Enmeshed

in a mechanism of domination people could be known, controlled, transformed

and used. As we saw, this rested on a new technology of design in which bodies

were placed (the panopticon), these bodies were then regulated through new tech-

nologies of coding (timetables, routines) and body-object training (rifle drills),

supplemented by various techniques (surveillance, documentation, examination).

Through these technologies and techniques bodies are made visible, politically

compliant and economically productive. Techniques come to the fore. Through

them power is operationalized (Foucault 1990: 11). Accordingly, Foucault made

the question of techniques an ongoing concern of his work, by which he meant

the specific practices which concretize political rationalities and tie individuals to

social collectives in particular ways.

Latour (2005: 86) has suggested that this aspect of Foucaults scholarship, the

analysis of the very stuff of power, has been forgotten in the Anglophone world,

but his message has not been lost on actor-network theorists. The only way to

understand how power is locally exerted is thus to take into account everything

that has been put to one side, that is, essentially, techniques (Latour 1986: 277).

Power is simply their effect (Latour 1986; Foucault 1979: 27). We should, how-

ever, note differences of emphasis. Foucault was interested in the ways in which

techniques resocialize human subjects; ANT is more interested in the ways in

which techniques socialize non-human objects (Latour 1999: 197). Still, the influ-

ence of Foucault is clear. Laws article on the long-distance control of Portuguese

colonies (Law 1986b) is a case in point. This required ship construction that could

protect sailors from enemies and from the elements. Ships needed to be capable of


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covering vast distances with commercially viable amounts of cargo. This neces-sitated navigational instrumentation that was durable, portable and reliable. Law

(1986a: 17) extends Foucaults comments about drilled people to technologies,

discussing the development of docile devices like astrolabes (see also Callon

(1991: 151) on docile agents.)

Foucaults Inuence on ANT

While Foucault enjoys canonical status in Surveillance Studies, his profile in STS

is considerably lower. This is particularly strange given his profound influence onANT, which has been in ascendency within STS for two decades. We will consider

ANTs intellectual debt to Foucault with reference to its leading figures: Latour,

Law, and Callon. We will do so by examining the topics of power, materiality, the

nature of the social, non-human agency and technological neutrality. These topics

have been selected as they form the core of what leading protagonists take ANTs

concerns to be. Law (1992), for example, sums up the core principles of ANT

thus: it is centrally interested in the operations of power, and it conceives of the

social as a heterogeneous network. Knowledge, action and power are explained asmaterially embodied network effects (Law 1992: 381). As we shall see, these ideas

all resonate with Foucault.

ANT shares Foucaults (1982) definition of power as the ability to affect the

actions of others (Latour 1986: 265). Success is therefore measured in the same

way. Disciplinary power results in the docility of opponents. Like Foucault (1979:

27) ANT treats power as effect rather than cause, and as strategy not property (Law

1986a). The notion of power operating through a network is also already present

in Foucaults (1980: 98) thought: Power must be analysed as something whichcirculates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It

is never localized here or there, never in anybodys hands, never appropriated as a

commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like

organisation. Compare Latour (1991: 110): Power is not a property of any one

of those elements but of a chain of human and non-human actors. For Foucault

(1994b: 345) as for ANT this network is heterogeneously composed: [p]ower

relations are rooted in the whole network of the social, a multiple network of

diverse elements (Foucault 1979: 307). People and things do not populate a void;rather they occupy heterogeneous space, with various sites defined by their re-

lations (Foucault 1986: 23). The network is invoked by Foucault (1990: 46) to

describe social formations such as the family, as well as to describe our social

situation more broadly, [t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch


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of space. . . . We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world isless that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects

points and intersects with its own skein (Foucault 1986: 22).

In Discipline and Punish (1979), Power/Knowledge (1980) and The Pu-

nitive Society (1997a), Foucault discusses the materiality of power, and in the

opening volume of The History of Sexuality(1990: 140), he reminds us that power

is made possible only through agencement concrets (concrete arrangements). That

is to say, power is not a network of forces, but a multiple network of diverse

elementswalls, space, institution, rules, discourse . . . a strategic distribution ofelements of different natures and levels (Foucault 1979: 307). This is precisely

what ANT theorists take the social to be, nothing other than patterned networks

of heterogeneous materials (Law 1992: 381, emphasis in original). ANT also

fully subscribes to Foucaults notion of the materiality of power. Writes Latour:

Left to its own devices, a social tie made only of social ties would be limited

to very short-lived, local, face-to-face, unequipped interactions. . . . When

power is exerted, it is because it is not made of social ties. . . . It is when

power is exercised through things that dont sleep and associations thatdont break down that it can last longer and expand furtherand for this,

of course, links made of another stuff than social contracts are required.

(Latour 2004: 225)

Foucaults work is sensitive to the ways in which subjects become objects and the

ways in which objects act upon subjects. Colin Gordon (1980: 23839) draws at-

tention to the significance of this. Foucault does not affirm the radical autonomy

of human from physical technologies; moreover, he jettisons the ethical

polarisation of the subject-object relationship. Domination, after all, is simul-

taneously subjectification and objectification. Gordon directs us to Foucaults

discussion of Man-the-Machine, although his later observations on body-object

articulation are more apposite. Foucault argues that the early modern idea of

man as machine had two sources of influence, an anatomico-metaphysical register

inaugurated by Descartes and elaborated by subsequent philosophers and phy-

sicians, and a technico-political register beginning in the military but spreading

to schools and hospitals. The former aimed at making the body intelligible, the

latter useful. One was aimed at comprehension, the other control. Man could be

treated as a machine, with bodily movements made to operate as if clockwork:

The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it

down and rearranges it (Foucault 1979: 138). Foucault continues in this vein


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citing Ordonnance du 1er janvier 1766, pour rgler lexercise de linfanterie, aweapons drill for the correct holding, aiming, firing, and reloading of rifles. Here

the body relates to manipulated object in a precisely codified manner. Another

example concerns the Prussian military regulations of 1743 which stipulated six

stages for bringing the weapon to foot, four to extend it and thirteen to raise it to

the shoulder. In the process soldier and rifle are fused, the two become one, bonded

by a power that operates over all surfaces. Together they become a body-weapon,

body-tool, body-machine complex (Foucault 1979: 153). Latour (1994: 32) also

wrote of person and firearm in combination as more than the sum of their parts,describing the result as a gun-citizen. Like Foucault, Latours analysis eschews

moralist accounts which focus exclusively on users of technology (people kill

people) and materialist accounts focusing only upon the technology being used

(guns kill people). Neither of their analyses proceeds with essences, subjects or

objects, but with a hybrid composite. What is fore-grounded is the mediating role

of techniques. They argue for what we might call a distributed agency (people

with guns kill people).

Nonetheless, as Latour (2002) would do much later, Foucault identified amoral dimension to technology. Tellingly, Foucault (1979: 223) refers to moral-

ity as a set of physico-political techniques. Here he adds his voice to all of the

others that have opposed the nave view of technological neutrality: technology

as mere tool, as mere means to an end. Instead, technologies are positioned as

political actors. Means and ends are enmeshed. Technologies like stethoscopes are

designed to do specific things, to allow certain actions. That is, there is a morality

to artefacts that affect decisive transformations. As noted, institutional formations

are included in this. Foucault (2007: 149) writes that [t]he architecture of thehospital must be the agent and the instrument of cure. Prison is discussed as

an instrument and vector of power (Foucault 1979: 30). The cell acts as moral

agent, disciplines fundamental structure, necessary for isolation, reflection and

transformation. It is the instrument by which one may reconstitute both homo

oeconomicus and the religious conscience, the means by which the body and

soul are worked upon to reconstitute deviant subject as model citizen (Foucault

1979: 123). Warders do not need to exert force, this is assured by the materiality

of things (Foucault 1979: 239). Walls do the punishing. Stones can make peopledocile and knowable.

ANT scholars have noted their affinities with Foucault. Callon (1986a: 196)

introduced the sociology translation as a new sociology of power. It would later be

known as ANT. His programmatic article hinted at ANTs progenitor. In his con-


14/19


cluding comments about translationhow power is realized and how the conductof others is controlledhe directed his readers to a final footnote: this point links

with the notion of the political economy of power proposed by Michel Foucault

(Callon 1986b: 230). Latours (1986: 279) discussion of power draws the same

conclusion, the result of ANT analysis is in effect the same result as that obtained

by Michel Foucault . . . when he dissolves the notion of a power held by the power-

ful in favor of micro-powers diffused through the many technologies to discipline

and keep in line. ANT, then, is simply an expansion of Foucaults notion to the

many techniques employed in machines and the hard sciences. Law (1992: 388)offers a further point of connection when he notes that processes of translation

like Foucauldian discourses, ramify through and reproduce themselves in a range

of network instances or locations.

What might be original to ANT? Law (1992: 387) suggests that because it

makes no sharp ontological distinction between subject and object it is analyti-

cally radical. As demonstrated,Discipline and Punish had already taken this posi-

tion. Law (1992: 389) further suggests that ANTs relational materialism might be

novel, by which he means its insistence on viewing both people and things as partof the social scientists story. But recalling Foucaults writings on heterogeneity,

materiality and networks this claim is also contestable. Indeed, Law (1994: 11)

would later write that relational materialism is not unique to ANT, rather it is a

sensibility it shares with Foucault and various stars of STS like Donna Haraway

and Madeleine Akrich. In more recent writings still ANT is offered as a scaled

down version of Foucaults discussions of discourse and epistemes (Law 2007: 6).

The real point of departure is methodological not conceptual. Foucault excavates

points in the past, ANT tells empirical stories about processes of translation inthe present (Law 1992: 387). For the most partand this only seems to hold if

we ignore Foucaults interviews and shorter works and Latour (1988) and Laws

(1986b) historic piecesFoucault was in the archive whereas ANT theorists are

in the field. In an interview Latour (2003: 16) brought some clarification to his

lifes work. He described his enduring project as an analysis of contemporary civi-

lizations truth-generation sites: science, religion, law, technology and techniques.

Again, this is rather close to Foucaults core concerns. Perhaps the methodological

differences, such as they are, are less significant than the political reasons thatseem to drive them. Foucaults excavations show us that our social arrangements

can be different because they have been different, while ANT shows us how power

is achieved and how worlds are built. Both, in their own ways, offer the possibility

of alternatives.


15/19


Before STS and ANT came into being Foucault had already made the pointthat neither agency nor morality are the exclusive preserve of humanity. Similarly,

prior to Latour (1991) writing Technology Is Society Made Durable, Foucault

had already shown us the the decisive role of technological procedures and ap-

paratuses in the organization of a society (De Certau 2000: 187, emphasis in

original). Humans can not be abstracted from the very technologies that help

constitute them. Matter matters. Hence the proliferation of words like apparatus,

instrumentations, machineries, mechanisms, techniques, technologies and techno-

politics throughout Discipline and Punish to capture the silent agents of hisstory (De Certau 2000: 185). By showing, in a single case, the heterogeneous

and equivocal relations between apparatuses and ideologies, Michel De Certau

(2000: 189) writes, Foucault has constituted a new object of historical study:

that zone in which technological procedures have specific effects of power, obey

logical dynamisms which are specific to them, and produce fundamental turnings

aside in the juridical and scientific institutions. Foucaults notion of apparatus

(dispositif) assumes central significance here. His fullest definition of the term is

to be found in The Confession of the Flesh:

What Im trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heteroge-

neous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms,

regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,

philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositionsin short, the said as

much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus

itself is the system of relations that can be established between these ele-

ments. (Foucault 1980: 194)

Compare, once more, ANT theorists on the nature of the social: Agents, texts,

devices, architectures are all generated in, form part of, and are essential to, the

networks of the social (Law 1992: 379).

Conclusion

This article has advanced a case for taking Foucault seriously as a theorist of tech-

nology. Only rarely is he acknowledged as such. The oversight is strange given

the fact that Foucault anchored much of his conceptual terminology in technol-

ogy. This vocabulary was necessary as technology was the lens through which he

made sense of the world. Technologies channel action. Through them and their

allied techniques we understand, and transform, ourselves and others. They play

a crucial role in the constitution of the subject and in the construction of soci-


16/19


ety. Recognising this, Foucault (1997a) located his intellectual output within atechnological framework. We therefore need to understand technology if we are

to understand his work. This point is particularly pertinent to his core concern:

power. For Foucault power is not a capacity residing within particular individuals

but an interactive effect, disseminated through heterogeneous networks of people

and things in combination. Technologies and techniques come to the fore as the

creators, carriers, and conveyors of power relations (Foucault 1979: 201; Foucault

1984). They are the means by which power is exercised and its very substance.

This has been recognised by ANT scholars who have profitably applied Foucaultsinsights to illuminate the production of scientific knowledge and the construction

of technological artefacts in a range of empirical case studies. In the process they

have become one of the leading schools within STS.

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