10. Critical Criminology
10.3 Post-Structuralism: Foucault and Critical Criminology
Kevin Walby and Kelly Gorkoff
Foucault, Marx and Power
Another key figure in critical criminology is Michel Foucault. While not a Marxist, the influence of Marx is evident in his work. As discussed above, for Marx, power is always connected to economic power and how it manifests at the level of the state. Marx’s contemporaries focus on how bloody legislation and state repression to uphold capitalist relations of production/capitalist social structures. Foucault reconsidered how power works, and he has been called a post-structuralist. He argued that simply focusing on power as equal to the law creates a kind of “sterilizing political consequence” (1990, p. 79). Instead, he views power via language and how we think and know about things, or in other words, how power works between people, not on people.
What makes Foucault’s work important is that he extends or broadens the analysis of power away from economic re/oppression into thinking about power existing flowing/circulating between people and groups/institutions. A student of Althusser, Foucault rejected the idea that people were duped into submission by ideology, arguing instead that people actively engaged with power on a daily basis. For Foucault, power operates like a network of relations that we are all a part of. This encompasses more than economic power, and includes power in the form of language and action. He argued that thinking about power this way encourages us to understand power similar to a building block in how things get made, composed or constituted. As critical criminologists, if what we are interested in is investigating power relations, turning to Foucault helps broaden our scope of analysis.
Phases of Foucauldian Thought
Foucault’s arguments changed over time. Although it is difficult to periodise or categorise Foucault’s work, some have argued that there are three movements or phases to Foucault’s thinking. The first is called the archaeological phase, the second is the genealogical phase, and the third is the phase of ethics.
In the archaeological phase, Foucault (1972) is interested in the emergence of discourses and how these are translated into techniques or methods of power. In this case, power is not thought of as repressive but is based in knowledge and takes the form of charts, maps, diagrams and tables that make human activity understandable.. A discourse is the general domain of all statements and classifications about some topic or issue, such as the discourse of child development (e.g., benchmarks of biological, emotional, and psychological changes occurring in young people as they grow) or discourse of victimhood (e.g., the condition of being hurt, damaged or made to suffer) (Gorkoff, 2011). Grounded in this way of thinking, rather than seeing law simply as a bloody mechanism or a mechanism of force, Foucault understands law as a discourse or a mechanism for categorising and c