Foucault’s account of power has a false synchronic appearance despite latent cyclicism

Evidence

Yet, Foucault could have still given an account of the discursive author without running such risks; for it is possible to argue, historically (and he certainly was a foremost historian), that épistémès and truth regimes have cyclical lives, that they rise and fall, and that, like the Khaldunian dynastic sequences, and even life cycles, they undergo formative periods, then periods of maturation and stability, before they decline and meet their end (without any of this entailing that cycles and cyclical time are identical). The thrust of Foucault’s theories of power, knowledge, and the rest was explicitly and intensely concerned with the middle stage (mostly located in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); and when he did dwell on the predecessors of the modern systems (for example, modes of punishment and surveillance, concepts of juridicality or pastoral power), it was not to show the workings of the earlier systems and their épistémès or modalities of the historical processes of change. Rather, it was to make explicit the residues and effects of a historical process so as to explicate in (his typically) forceful ways the modus vivendi and modus operandi of a modern, presently operating type of power. His account, implicitly grounded in a larger though unarticulated historical narrative, has a rather false synchronic appearance. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 347

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ibn Khaldun’s dynastic cycle theory in muqaddimah and to the broader debate about whether Foucault was anti-historical or crypto-cyclical. — connects to: Power in the postmodern is a circulating cycle with no locatable source. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 150