STEPHEN MILLER
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ogy is a method of putting truth in an historical context. "Each society
has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth; that is, the types of
discourse which it accepts and makes function as true. .. ." Arguing that
"truth isn't outside power," he calls into question the "apparently disin–
terested attention" and "the 'pure' devotion to objectivity" of the scholar.
Disinterestedness is impossible, he implies, because the scholar is inevitably
a prisoner of a certain "regime of truth."
Foucault's notion of genealogy, unlike Nietzsche's, has a strongly
political coloration. Nietzsche celebrates noble souls and their "truths,"
but these truths can be grasped only by other noble souls, who always have
been and will be few in number. By contrast, Foucault often speaks of the
need for radical political change, for creating a new man, and he exhorts
the political intellectual to struggle against "that regime of truth which is
so essential to the structure and functioning of our society."
Foucault's political project is not very clear. At times he implies that
"truth" will always be in quotation marks, since even if a transformation
takes place, truth will still be a function of power. In support of this view,
he says that "humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules
and thus proceeds from domination to domination ." Yet for the most part
his view of history is strongly linear: the present age suffers from the dom–
inance of "modern power structures," yet a political revolution is possible,
one that will put an end to this "regime of truth." The political intellec–
tual, Foucault says, has a mission : to "detach the power of truth from the
forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it oper–
ates at the present time."
Like Nietzsche, Foucault strongly attacks the modern age, but for a
different reason: whereas Nietzsche finds "modern ideas" contemptible,
Foucault finds them frightening - contending that they have been used to
justify a vast expansion of the state's power. He speaks of "new tech–
nologies of power introduced since the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries" that have been employed to control men's lives . According to
him, both rationalization and bureaucratization have led to "excesses of
political power." Ignoring the differences between totalitarian regimes and
bourgeois liberal regimes, he speaks
or
genocide as being "the dream of
modern powers." He sees modern state power spreading its wings ev–
erywhere, affecting all aspects of modern life - hospi tals, schools, and
especially the criminal justice system. "It seems to me," Foucault says,
"that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the work–
ing of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to
criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has al–
ways exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that
one can fight them."
