05--matthewman

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

Introduction

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 afford them. 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

The Relationship between Thought Structures and Media Structures 275

thinker we commence by looking at the deployment of technological terms in his work, 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 are positioned 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). In Discipline 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

276 Techn: Research in Philosophy and Technology

the point of meaninglessness. To counter this, the STS literature defines it in four ways: 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 into objects 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 discussion and 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,


since this project involves histories of care and techniques of the self. In his later career 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 of power 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 theorist of 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 Innovation

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 section we 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 a professional 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.


When technological theorists explain the point of technology they routinely fall 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 we exercise 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 at once 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 withdrawal that 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 cannot see is shown in the distance from what one must not see. (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


relations: the doctor-patient relationship, the structure of clinical research and pedagogy, 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) including knowledge, 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. In Discipline 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


panopticon prison was built to see in. Prisoners were arranged so as to be under constant 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, understood in its broad sense as objects, activities, knowledge and modes of organisation, to power.

Panopticism: A Technical Solution to a Technical Problem

In Discipline 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 transformations in 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 social control 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,


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 Punish is 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 ascribed to 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 Mediating 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


electricity. Even within the field of Latours labours, STS, there is an obsession with 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, Population eighty). 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


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


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 Influence 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 on ANT, 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 as materially 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 which circulates, 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


of space. ... We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less 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 of elements 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 that dont 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


citing Ordonnance du 1er janvier 1766, pour rgler lexercise de linfanterie, a weapons 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 a moral 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 the hospital 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 people docile 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-


cluding comments about translationhow power is realized and how the conduct of 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 part of 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 in the 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 that seem 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.


Before STS and ANT came into being Foucault had already made the point that 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 his story (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-


ety. Recognising this, Foucault (1997a) located his intellectual output within a technological 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 Foucaults insights 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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