[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

discerns in them the at first scattered indexes of an apparatus whose elements become better
defined, combine with each other, and reproduce themselves little by little throughout all the
strata of society.
This remarkable historiographical "operation" raises simultaneously two questions which
must nevertheless not be confused: on the one hand, the decisive role of technological
procedures and apparatuses in the organization of a society; on the other, the exceptional
development of a particular category of these apparatuses. It is thus still necessary to ask
ourselves:
(a) How can we explain the privileged development of the particular series constituted by
panoptic apparatuses?
(b) What is the status of so many other series which, pursuing their silent itineraries, have not
given rise to a discursive configuration or to
((48))
a technological systematization? They could be considered as an immense reserve constituting
either the beginnings or traces of different developments.
It is in any case impossible to reduce the functioning of a society to a dominant type of
procedures. Recent studies have pointed to other technological apparatuses and their interplay
with ideology; these studies which have also underlined the dominant character of these
apparatuses, though from different points of view thus, for example, the work of Serge
Moscovici, especially on urban organization,' or that of Pierre Legendre, on the apparatus of
medieval law.' These apparatuses seem to prevail over a more or less lengthy period of time,
then fall back into the stratified mass of procedures, while others replace them in the role of
"informing" a system.
A society is thus composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative
institutions and of innumerable other practices that remain "minor," always there but not
organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional,
scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others. It is in this multifarious and silent
"reserve" of procedures that we should look for "consumer" practices having the double
characteristic, pointed out by Foucault, of being able to organize both spaces and languages,
whether on a minute or a vast scale.
2. The final formation (the contemporary technologies of observation and discipline) which
serves as the point of departure for the regressive history practiced by Foucault explains the
impressive coherence of the practices he selects and examines. But can it be assumed that the
ensemble of procedures exhibits the same coherence? A priori, no. The exceptional, indeed
cancerous, development of panoptic procedures seems to be indissociable from the historical
role to which they have been assigned, that of being a weapon to be used in combatting and
controlling heterogeneous practices. The coherence in question is the result of a particular
success, and will not be characteristic of all technological practices. Beneath what one might
call the "monotheistic" privilege that panoptic apparatuses have won for themselves, a "poly-
theism" of scattered practices survives, dominated but not erased by the triumphal success of
one of their number.
3. What is the status of a particular apparatus when it is transformed into the organizing
principle of a technology of power? What effect does foregrounding have on it? What new
relationships within the dispersed
((49))
ensemble of procedures are established when one of them is institutionalized as a
penitentiary-scientific system? The apparatus thus privileged might well lose the effectiveness
that it owed, according to Foucault, to its miniscule and silent technical advances. By leaving
the obscure stratum in which Foucault locates the determining mechanisms of a society, it
would be in the position of institutions slowly "colonized" by still silent procedures. Perhaps
in fact (this is, at least, one of the hypotheses of this essay), the system of discipline and
control which took shape in the nineteenth century on the basis of earlier procedures, is today
itself "vampirized" by other procedures.
4. Can one go even further? Is not the very fact that, as a result of their expansion, the
apparatuses of control become an object of clarification and thus part of the language of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]