Foucault and the Possibilities
of a Postmodern Church
Michel Foucault’s attention is drawn to institutions of power: prisons and schools, hospitals and factories, sex and money. What could he have to say to a postmodern church? In this chapter, we’ll explore Foucault’s claim that “power is knowledge”in order to see its insight into Christian formation and discipleship.
Raising the Curtain: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The hospital is a machine—that is Chief ’s thesis in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.1 The hospital is part of the Combine that “works over” individuals by means of its power, its control. The hospital’s walls hum with the sound of its machinery of surveillance and repression—“hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets.”2 On the mental ward of this Oregon hospital, Chief—a longtime resident—is able, in a way, to see through walls and can thus observe the hospital’s machinations of power firsthand. Even the strategies aimed toward cure are in fact systems of control and domination: from the orderlies to the medication, from the strict schedule and work regimen to the “therapeutic circle” that serves only to humiliate— all performed to the tune of banal background music that functions as the soundtrack for repression.
At the center of the machine—but also an effect of it—is the watchful eye of Nurse Ratched. From the glass-enclosed nurse’s station, she keeps watch over the ward like the warden from a prison watchtower. Indeed, the mental ward is a panopticon of sorts, a structure where a central hub of power is able to see all of those subjected to it, monitoring their actions sheerly by surveillance—by the threat of being seen. Nurse Ratched oversees this environment and employs all the tools of her trade to carry out her surveillance and punishment. Robotlike herself, Nurse Ratched is the eyes and ears of the machine, the agent of its disciplines. Every once in a while, Chief glimpses her real self, her inner workings, when “she really lets herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger than a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load.”3 But as Chief realizes, while Nurse Ratched is the face of the system, she is but a part of it: “It’s not just the Big Nurse by herself,” he concludes, “but the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”4
Of course, Nurse Ratched does not speak or think of her work as surveillance and certainly not as punishment. The stated goal of the institution is healing and cure. Or, to stick with Chief ’s mechanistic metaphor, the hospital is a shop for repair—not quite manufacturing, since the specimens are brought into the shop, but rather remanufacturing, setting broken objects into a mold that knocks off the edges and makes them conform to the shape of societal expectations. The physicians are merely technicians whose procedures are “installations” that are engineered for cure. Sometimes the patient’s wiring is so malfunctioning that the hospital needs to reset the circuitry with a dose of high voltage (electroshock therapy). Although some patients have an initial concern, patient Daniel Harding explains that the goal of the procedure is simply a microcosm of the goal of the institution: “In this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.” Responding to the suggestion that this is similar to “electrocuting a guy for murder,” Harding continues: “Both activities are much more closely related than you think; they are both cures.”5
What really concerns Chief, however, is not the regimen of medicines and timetables, restraints and electroshock therapy. What is of greater concern are the Combine’s more covert operations, its stealth control and manipulation—the way it “works on you” without your knowing it, the way it worked on Chief ’s father. “They work on you ways you can’t fight!” Chief warns. “They install things. They start as quick as they see you’re gonna be big and go to working and installing their filthy machinery when you’re little, and keep on and on and on till you’re fixed!”6
Wandering into the panopticon one day—into the clutches of the Combine and Nurse Ratched—is Randle P. McMurphy, shipped to the mental ward from a work farm at Pendleton. What stands most in need of repair in McMurphy is the fact that he doesn’t think he needs repair. (McMurphy is committed, whereas most of the other patients are in the ward voluntarily, submitting to the repair work of therapy by choice.) McMurphy becomes something of a project for Nurse Ratched, who sees that he is a “manipulator” planning to “take over.” But the Combine and its emissaries will have none of that. The narrative of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest recounts the struggle of the system in its attempts to repair R. P. McMurphy and his resistance to its power, which inspires others, like Chief, to resist its clutches. But ultimately the story ends with the triumph of the system, culminating in McMurphy’s lobotomy, which leaves him a near lifeless shell on the Acutes ward. (To prevent McMurphy’s my-thology from being tarnished, Chief smothers the now-docile McMurphy and, because of McMurphy’s heroic resistance, finally musters the strength and drive to break through the glass of the mental ward and escape into the surrounding hills.)
The film and novel paint a vivid and disturbing picture of institutional power and its attempts to whitewash its mechanisms with paternalistic claims about “cure” and the “good of the patient.” Although McMurphy is the hero because of his libido-driven resistance to the system, even his empowerment of the other patients cannot stop the driving cogs of the Combine: McMurphy, though mythologized, is crushed by the machine. Thus One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest leaves us just where we would expect from a work dating from the 1960s: with a deep suspicion of institutions, institutional power, and the control they exert over us. We are left simply with the return of Nurse Ratched, the continued machinations of the hospital, and the remaining hum of the Combine in its walls. If we are to escape control and the trappings of institutional power, the only way out is to follow Chief through the shattered window, wandering alone, institutionless but “free.”
Foucault’s Claim: Power Is Knowledge
There is a sense in which Michel Foucault is the Randle P. McMurphy of our unholy trinity—a somewhat libido-driven7 rebel, protesting control and resisting systems by documenting their covert domination in modern culture. If Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest became something of a visual anthem for a generation, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish has become an analogous anthem for postmodernity across the disciplines, from criminal justice to education.8 What is fascinating is the way in which Foucault’s history of prisons says so much about other institutions such as schools, factories, and hospitals. While we might expect the hospital of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to mirror Foucault’s specific analysis of hospitals in his earlier work The Birth of the Clinic,9 the mental ward under Nurse Ratched’s surveillance more resembles the carceral systems described in Discipline and Punish. Indeed, we need to appreciate that Foucault’s account of the “birth of the prison” is not really about penitentiaries; it is about the way in which society as a whole reflects the prison. The prison is but a microcosm of society itself.
For Foucault, at the root of our most cherished and central institutions—hospitals, schools, businesses, and, yes, prisons—is a network of power relations. The same is true of our most celebrated ideals; at root, Foucault claims, knowledge and justice reduce to power. While we moderns—especially we moderns who grew up on “Schoolhouse Rock”—were shaped by the maxim of Francis Bacon proclaiming that “knowledge is power,” Foucault’s postmodern axiom is that “power is knowledge.” However, Foucault himself resists any bumper-stickerization of this notion. As he clarifies, he does not mean that knowledge and power are identical;10instead, he means to emphasize the inextricable relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge, or what counts as knowledge, is not neutrally determined.11Instead, what counts as knowledge is constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic. As he states near the beginning of Discipline and Punish, we should give up the notion that power leads to madness; quite to the contrary, “we should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (DP, 28). Thus Foucault regularly speaks of “power-knowledge relations” or the “nexus” of power/knowledge.
Like Chief in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, postmodernism is characterized by a deep hermeneutic of suspicion.12This is why Foucault, following Nietzsche, describes his method in intellectual history as “genealogy” or “archaeology” whose task is to uncover the secret, submerged biases and prejudices that go into shaping what is called the truth.13There is no claim to truth that is innocent; there is no knowledge that simply falls into our minds from the sky, pristine and untainted. What might be claimed as obvious or self-evident is, in fact, covertly motivated by other interests—the interest of power. If someone says, “What do you mean? This is just the way things are. Can’t you see that?” Foucault the genealogist traces the lineage of such thinking to the beliefs that really motivate it. Or to use his archaeological metaphor, he digs beneath the surface of what goes around as objective truth to show the machinations of power at work below the surface. Like Chief, who can see through the pristine white walls of the hospital to its more monstrous workings, Foucault sees through the neat and tidy claims to objective truth, seeing them as only masks of power. The genealogist, then, shares Chief ’s critical X-ray vision, and “finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.”14Like a genealogist whose patient documentation of a family tree shows the family’s complicity in the evils of slavery, so Foucault’s genealogy intends to show that modernity’s claims to scientific objectivity or moral truth are fruits of a poisoned tree of power relations. Or to use an architectural metaphor, Foucault’s archaeology sets out to show that what we thought were sure foundations are more like collections of fragments piled in the bottom of the hole.15Foucault is not out to lament this situation, as though we had lost our foundations, but rather to get us to own up to what has always been the case.
To claim that power is knowledge, then, is to make a claim about the power relations that stand behind both institutions and ideals. As Nietzsche earlier claimed in his Genealogy of Morals, good and evil are just names that we give to the power interests of the strong versus those of the weak. Thus “in a sense,” Foucault concludes, “only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non-place,’ the endlessly repeated play of dominations.”16The story of humanity is not the Enlightenment fiction of perpetual progress or the constant progression of the race, as Kant (and Richard Rorty) suggest, but rather simply the shift from one combat to another, from one form of domination to another.
Foucault’s claim, however, is not a proclamation made from on high, as if it were just the kind of heaven-sent axiom he protests against. His claim about the relation between power and knowledge is not an a priori or abstract claim; rather, it is a claim that bubbles up from his analyses of concrete institutions and ideals such as hospitals and prisons, notions of madness versus reason, or the history of sexuality. Thus Foucault’s claim is always made on the basis of case studies—where the axiom is not applied to a case but rather arises from it. If Foucault thinks that power is knowledge, it is because the history of modern institutions bears that out. Let us consider one of his case studies in more detail both to see how Foucault operates and to understand the context of his more general claim. I have chosen to focus on his most influential study—that of prisons offered in Discipline and Punish.
The Subject of Discipline
Foucault’s account of the modern prison begins with a ghastly scene from 1757, recounting the punishment and execution of a regicide named Damiens. Wearing nothing but a shirt, he was conveyed in an oxcart “to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulfur . . . then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds” (DP, 3). As it turned out, six horses were eventually needed for this final operation, and “when that did not suffice, they were forced, in order to cut off the wretch’s thighs, to sever the sinews and hack at the joints” (DP, 3).
Though we are horrified by the description of such an event orchestrated in the name of justice—and surely Foucault opens with just such an intention—we will properly understand Foucault’s analysis only if we appreciate that, for him, modern society is in some sense worse than the one that tortured and executed Damiens. In other words, the thesis of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is that the society that tortured Damiens is less dangerous than the society that locked up Chief in that Oregon mental institution—that what Damiens suffered was, in some sense, less evil than what Randle P. McMurphy suffered. By the end of Discipline and Punish, Foucault wants us to be equally horrified by the mechanisms of domination that suffuse modern society.
This is why Discipline and Punish—like almost all of Foucault’s case studies—is not ultimately about prisons but rather concerns modern society as a whole. If he documents a change in the strategies of punishment and discipline within the penal system, this is only a microcosm of broader movements in modern Western culture. Although the book is divided into three parts that trace the historical development of penal theory from torture (roughly, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to punishment (eighteenth century) and finally discipline (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the underlying force of Foucault’s descriptive argument is to show that there is no qualitative difference between these epochs—that, if anything, the later developments are somehow more brutal. The story of change in punishment is not a narrative of progress, let alone a story of the triumph of the humane, but rather the substitution of one form of domination for another (more insidious) mode of domination. Foucault is interested in narrating not just the subplot of the history of prisons but rather the story of how we got to where we are: a modern “disciplinary”society where all of us, like Chief and McMurphy, are subject to mechanisms of control and repression.
What interests me about Foucault is his analysis of the way in which society is put together by sinews of power—and that it could not be otherwise. A different configuration of society is just a different (and not necessarily better) constellation of forces of power. All three parts of the book are trying to lay out the “mechanisms of power” at work in the different epochs of penal history. In the epoch of torture, this power “works on” the criminal in order to produce a confession, because a confession produces the truth—inscribes the truth in and on the body of the condemned (DP, 37, 38, 39–40, 41). This was brought about by both public and ritual means (DP, 43). The confession meant the condemned agreed with his sentence, which justified his punishment. But what was the end of such a “production of truth”? To solidify the power of the sovereign (DP, 47–49, 50). This is why he concludes that truth is always a function of power and vice versa: “The truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment,” and that is precisely what “is still to be found in contemporary penal practice” (DP, 55). At the core of Foucault’s historical analysis is really a genealogy of the present.
A change did take place in how punishment is administered:eighty years after the torture and execution of Damiens, the model of punishment was no longer the rack but the regimen of discipline with its specification of rules and schedules (see DP, 6–7). According to Foucault, the changes were not motivated by a desire to be more humane (as is commonly supposed) but rather were a means of dealing with political (even revolutionary) problems that attended the public display of torture. What began to happen was the opposite of what was intended: instead of enforcing new allegiance to the king, the spectacles of torture tended to make the people identify with the criminal! So punishment gradually became less violent and more secret. A “new age for penal justice” dawned (DP, 7). But the result of this shift was a social cost: “Crimes seemed to lose their violence, while punishments, reciprocally, lost some of their intensity, but at the cost of greater intervention” (DP, 75, emphasis added). Crime was constructed differently, based on new economic structures (focusing on property rather than violence). This created a certain “class justice” (DP, 75). But what interests Foucault is the way in which this shift in crime also entailed new emphasis on control and prevention and “stricter methods of surveillance” (DP, 77).
Was penal reform really a change in attitude, the result of a new “humanism”? Foucault is suspicious (see DP, 78): “More certainly and more immediately, it was an effort to adjust mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals; an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behavior, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures” (DP, 77). Such surveillance becomes synonymous with society itself, entailing “a closer penal mapping of the social body.” The result—and this is decisive—was to “make punishment and the repression of illegalities a regular function, coextensive with society” (DP, 82). Foucault goes on to speak of this as the generalization of punishment—the extension of controlling mechanisms to society itself—and the rest of Discipline and Punish traces this spreading and suffusion of discipline in modern society.
Through the course of his analysis, Foucault documents the formation of what he calls a “disciplinary society”—the primary goal of which is the creation of the individual—a “reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that [he has] called ‘discipline’ ” (DP, 194). So the goal of a disciplinary society, and the institutions within that society, is the formation of individuals by mechanisms of power. Society makes individuals in its own image, and the tools for such manufacturing are the disciplines of power. Here Foucault adds an important proviso: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in nega-tive terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality” (DP, 194). In Foucault’s descriptive analyses, he does not attempt to offer any kind of evaluation of power as either positive or negative. But this does at least prohibit describing its effects as negative. For Foucault—and this is close to the heart of the theory of society offered in Discipline and Punish—power is necessary and constitutive of society. All that changes are the mechanisms and technologies of power. One could not have a society that is not fundamentally characterized by power relations.
As a case study of the disciplined society, Foucault asks us to compare the difference between the way medieval cities responded to disease and the way the early modern city responded to the plague. The “political dream” of a disciplinary society is found, in fact, in the historical organization of the plague-stricken town. Why? Because the plague-stricken town is the paradigmatic example of a regulated, disciplined organization of individuals subjected to constant surveillance and registration (“the gaze”): “a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism” (DP, 197). While the medieval case of the leper produced procedures of exclusion and isolation, “the [modern] plague gave rise to disciplinary projects” (DP, 198). “The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town . . . is the utopia of the perfectly governed city” (DP, 198). Note that here Foucault’s conception of the nature of power comes to the surface: the two different modes (exclusion, discipline), insofar as they are manifestations of power, always involve power over others; power is always some form of control. But couldn’t one conceive of power differently? We’ll return to this question.
The organization of society around discipline (as a new mode of power) culminates in an “architecture” concerned with much more than buildings; it is an architecture for society itself that generalizes “the gaze.” The architectural ideal is the panopticon envisioned by Bentham’s model for a penitentiary. “The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance, or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (DP, 205). That is why, whether in Bentham’s prison or in Nurse Ratched’s mental ward, “whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals [i.e., society] on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used” (DP, 205). Thus the panopticon gives rise to panopticism, the generalized mode of asymmetrical surveillance, of being seen without seeing:17 “The panoptic schema . . . was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function” (DP, 207). The panopticon, then, far from being just an architectural ideal for the prison, was the utopian dream of a disciplinary society, “a generalizable mode of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (DP, 205). Panopticism accomplishes the generalization of discipline throughout the social body.
Hence, “our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance” (DP, 217); that is, the generalization of discipline as constitutive of society itself (“coextensive with the entire social body,” DP, 213) weaves observation and documentation into the warp and woof of society in order to create “docile” and “useful” subjects—of the state, of capitalism, and so on (DP, 216–17, 220–21). The disciplinary society forms individuals into what it wants them to be: docile, productive consumers who are obedient to the state. Like McMurphy in the hands of Nurse Ratched, we are “projects” in need of reengineering and repair. We are all like the residents of the mental ward, in the place of being supervised and controlled, watched over and dominated by structures of surveillance and discipline that have become suffused through society.
In the final section of Discipline and Punish, a very important shift in the analysis and argument of the book takes place: in a sense, we come back to the prison here, since the predominant focus of part 3 is not the prison but society as a whole. In other words, part 3 traces the development of a disciplinary society. In part 4, Foucault suggests that the modern penitentiary is a product of a disciplinary society, rather than a disciplinary society being the reflection of penal practice. Thus, when we look at the modern penitentiary, we are looking at ourselves, seeing our society reflected in a mirror, as it were. The modern prison only codifies and localizes the generalization of discipline that has already been effected throughout the social body. It is not that the prison came to be a model for society; rather, the disciplinary mechanisms of society “colonized the legal institution” (DP, 231). If Foucault is documenting the birth of the prison, it is delivered from the matrix of a disciplinary society already in place. As an “apparatus for transforming individuals,” the penitentiary “merely reproduces, with a little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the social body” (DP, 233)—in the military, schools, hospitals, and factories.18As he comments, “This prison came from elsewhere” (DP, 256). And later he concludes that the prison “continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline” (DP, 302–3). It is not that society has come to mimic prisons but rather that prisons are microcosmic crystallizations of what is characteristic of society itself. In modern society discipline is ubiquitous.19
This condition is analyzed through three particular regimens:isolation, compulsory labor, and treatment. Isolation is meant to bring the offender into confrontation with himself; it is a moral discipline. Work creates a laboring subject (proletarian) fit for a capitalist society, reformed to meet the requirements of the machines of production (DP, 242); it is an economic discipline. Treatment or reform is a means of transforming the abnormal into a normal individual, to “cure” his abnormality; it is a kind of medical discipline.20As such, the modern penitentiary is about much more than mere detention or deprivation of liberty. These are necessary “supplements” to detention (DP, 248). They inscribe the structures and disciplines of society onto the offender. And it is this that gives birth to the delinquent as the target of reform—no longer a criminal or a monster, the offender is an “abnormality” (DP, 251–52). If the penitentiary is intended for the delinquent—the abnormal one—it is because the broader society has determined what counts as normal. In fact, this is almost precisely the theory of the “therapeutic community” on the ward in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As Chief recounts the theory, “A guy has to learn to get along in a group before he’ll be able to function in a normal society; how the group can help the guy by showing him where he’s out of place; how society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.”21 The creation of the delinquent gets to the heart of what Foucault sees at work, not only in modern penal practices but also in modern society as a whole: disciplinary power aimed at normalization. In fact, at the conclusion of the chapter (and the book) we see what function Discipline and Punish is meant to serve: it is a book intended to “serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society” (DP, 308). Hence, the prison is just one of many (all?) modern institutions that tend “to exercise a power of normalization” (DP, 308). What is this power? And how do we arrive at this conclusion?
The historic penitentiary at Mettray represents the culmination of this “carceral” ideal, incorporating the omni-disciplinarity of “cloister, prison, school, regiment” (DP, 293; cf. III.1). It included all the elements of the panoptic ideal, to the extent that even the observers were subjected to discipline when they were “taught the art of power relations” (DP, 295). “In the normalization of the power of normalization, in the arrangement of a power-knowledge over individuals, Mettray and its school marked a new era” (DP, 296). This new era involved the widening of carceral circles to society itself: “The carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body” (DP, 298). This in fact erased any kind of qualitative distinction between the “least irregularity” and the “greatest crime,” since both, on this register, were to be considered “a de-parture from the norm” (DP, 299). Rather than being an enemy of the sovereign or the social contract, “the social enemy was transformed into a deviant” (DP, 299)—hence the necessity for discipline and normalization from cradle to grave (DP, 300). The result is that nothing falls outside this carceral network: “There is no outside” (DP, 301). “In this panoptic society,” Foucault observes, “of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law [there is no ‘outlaw’]; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence” (DP, 301). In fact, he seems to suggest that the deviant is a product of society.
This widening of the carceral circle means that society is characterized not by a disjunction between the social and the carceral but rather by a “carceral continuum” (DP, 303) that operates on the basis of a new law, the norm. Normalizing power thus spreads: “Borne along by the omnipresence of the mechanisms of discipline, basing itself on all the carceral apparatuses, it has become one of the major functions of our society. The judges of normality are present everywhere” (DP, 304). So the political issue at stake in the question of the prison is not about whether it is corrective or not: “The problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them” (DP, 306). And it is precisely these powers of normalization that are the object of Foucault’s concern.
Will the Real Foucault Please Stand Up?
So far I have summarized Foucault’s case study in which he tries to concretely demonstrate the way in which power is knowledge or, more specifically, the necessary and ubiquitous role of power in society and social institutions. However, the next question is: Just what are we supposed to do with this analysis? Just why is Foucault painting this picture? What does he want us to conclude from this? What is Foucault trying to convince us of? After Foucault has powerfully described the development of modern, disciplinary society, what does he want us to do with this? Is this intended simply as a neutral, objective description of the way things are? As we’ve seen, such a notion runs counter to Foucault’s own notion of genealogy. Is there, then, behind this description a latent prescription? Or, to put it otherwise, is Foucault painting this intricate picture for us to show us what’s wrong with modern society? Is his work a protest—a call for liberation from such repressive structures?
Here we hit on a difficult matter of interpretation, not just for outsiders but even for Foucault scholars: Who is the real Michel Foucault?22Is he some kind of modern—an ultimately Enlightenment thinker committed to the autonomy and freedom of the individual? Is he a Marxist protesting the abuse of power and the oppressive structures of society? Is he a closet classic liberal who is lashing out against anything that would restrict the freedom and autonomy of the individual? These questions also place another question on the table: If Foucault is a postmodern thinker, just how modern is postmodernism? (And later we face another set of questions concerning just how far Christians can go in appropriating the Enlightenment project of freedom.) There are two basic ways that Foucault can be read in light of these questions:
1. The Nietzschean Foucault. On this reading, Foucault’s analyses are not intended to convey any kind of moralizing stance. In other words, the Nietzschean Foucault is not painting this picture of power to show that power is bad and should thus be undone. If Foucault is a Nietzschean, his project is purely descriptive and not intended to harbor any kind of prescription: he is just showing us the way things are, not how they’re supposed to be. If one started to talk about power as bad or to think about one organization of society as better than another, then one would be invoking a system of values. But as Foucault’s own exposition of Nietzsche demonstrates, for him all such values only reduce to power.23Beyond Foucault’s own confessed Nietzscheanism, one can cite other evidence for this reading. It is certainly the case that Foucault does not think that power is bad; unlike Lord Byron, he does not think that power necessarily corrupts. As we’ve already seen, Foucault thinks we should stop talking about power in negative terms of repression and exclusion and instead think of it positively in terms of production. The Nietzschean Foucault would be trying not to change the world but only to describe it, perhaps even to celebrate it.
2. The Liberal or Enlightenment Foucault. Marx famously remarked that whereas philosophers usually just interpret the world, the point is to change it. The other way to read Foucault is to see him working in this broadly modern or Enlightenment tradition that includes both Kant and Marx. And, in fact, Foucault himself later acknowledged that he saw himself as a kind of Enlightenment thinker working in the tradition of critical theory stemming from Kant, through Marx, up to the Frankfurt School of Jürgen Habermas and others.24In that case, the way to read Foucault is to see him giving us this disturbing picture of control and domination in order to motivate us to change things. The evidence for this reading of Foucault (which I think is the better one) is twofold: On the one hand, we have external evidence, such as Foucault’s own activist involvement in prison reform movements in France. On the other hand, the very language of Discipline and Punish already seems to communicate a negative evaluation of the way things are, eliciting a call for reform and revolution. When he describes particular configurations of power relations as networks of domination, such a descriptor already seems to entail an evaluation. A critical theory needs criteria. Indeed, the very notion of a neutral description of things runs counter to the core of Foucault’s thought (and, as we’ve already seen, Derrida’s too).
While there is certainly ambiguity on this score, the best reading of Foucault is to read him as a kind of closeted Enlightenment thinker; in fact, later in his work Foucault “comes out” on just this point.25Moreover, this is certainly the way that Foucault has been used—as a protest thinker, co-opted by various versions of the political left in order to resist the continued vestiges of control and domination in modern culture. As such, Foucault has been adopted by various movements—from gay rights to educational reform—that protest any form of control over the individual.
If Foucault is a kind of covert Enlightenment liberal, what does that mean? First, we need to specify what we mean by “liberal” here: a classical political liberal who places priority on the individual as a sovereign, autonomous agent—a being who is lord of his or her domain and thus resists any mode of external control. The watchword of liberalism is freedom: the free agent should not be controlled—by a king, by tradition, by religion, or by institutions. So the liberal’s slogan is varying versions of “Hands off! Don’t try to control what I think; don’t try to control what I believe; don’t try to control what I do.”26Any institution that tries to control beliefs or behavior is inherently dominating and repressive. And since institutions tend to be erected for just these reasons, there is a deep sense that institutions per se are structures of domination. Hence, liberalism in this sense is deeply anti-institutional; while leftists—whether politicos or filmmakers—speak about being radicals, it is usually a radicalizing of this Enlightenment notion of freedom. Thus there is a deeply libertarian streak to liberalism that eschews control and discipline. The very goal of Enlightenment is liberation, which is why both Kant and Marx are Enlightenment thinkers. And insofar as Foucault’s work feeds into just such impulses, it is hard not to see a libertarian streak in his descriptions.
Just as it is difficult not to side with McMurphy in the face of the grinding repression of the Combine and Big Nurse, so it is difficult not to be sympathetic to Foucault’s suspicion about institutions of discipline and formation. But I would argue that Christians should resist the temptation to side with either Mc-Murphy or Foucault (but neither should they side with Nurse Ratched or Mettray). On the other hand, Foucault provides some critical insights into the nature of discipline and its role in the formation of individuals. Thus my engagement with Foucault is complicated, as is my criticism. The critical point is that Foucault is absolutely right in his analysis of the way in which mechanisms of discipline serve to form individuals, but he is wrong to cast all such discipline and formation in a negative light. In other words, Christians should understand discipline positively, precisely because Christians should not be liberals in the classical sense described above. Christians should eschew the very notion of an autonomous agent who resists any form of control. By rejecting Foucault’s liberal Enlightenment commitments, but appropriating his analyses of the role of discipline in formation, we can almost turn Foucault’s project on its head.
Is Power All Bad?
If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity’s modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at a microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.27We don’t want denominations to tell us how to run our churches, and we don’t want churches to tell us how to run our lives. If either of these institutions threatens our autonomous sphere with control—let alone discipline—we jump ship: the church splits from the denomination to become an independent congregation, or the individual leaves the church and hops to another. So when we see the experience of Chief and McMurphy, because of our own (American) liberal suspicions about institutions and institutional control, we identify with these anti-institutional figures—all in the name of freedom (even if we also talk in terms of “law and order”).28
But it is crucial to distinguish truly biblical conceptions of positive freedom and empowerment from liberal Enlightenment conceptions of negative freedom as a kind of hands-off stance. To put it a little more staunchly: freedom is an idol of the contemporary church, and we will only properly resist Foucault’s liberalism if we give up our own.
Let me anticipate an initial response: Why should Christians resist these liberal conceptions of freedom? How can I be against freedom? Am I going to offer a defense of domination? If we’re opposed to liberal conceptions of freedom, doesn’t that mean we’re for control and domination?
Well, yes. But in order for me to show why this isn’t a revival of fascism, let’s return to Foucault’s conception of power. As Foucault describes it, social institutions and relationships are necessarily constructed on the basis of power relations; power is ubiquitous. Moreover, power is understood as power over others—some kind of domination (even if it isn’t a simple bifurcation of haves and have-nots, those with power and those without).29This power is channeled through mechanisms of discipline—various practices and regimens—that form the individual by conforming him to what society wants—a good worker and consumer. And while he cautions that we should not think of this negatively, the overwhelming impression of his work is that this situation is both repressive and oppressive.
But should we accept this negative view of power? Is power all bad? Specifically, can Christians share in this devaluation of power and discipline as inherently evil? Can we who claim to be disciples—who are called and predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29)—be opposed to discipline and formation as such? Can we who are called to be subject to the Lord of life really agree with the liberal Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self? Are we not above all called to subject ourselves to our Domine and conform to his image? Of course, we are called not to conform to the patterns of “this world” (Rom. 12:2) or to our previous evil desires (1 Peter 1:14), but that is a call not to nonconformity as such but rather to an alternative conformity through a counterformation in Christ, a transformation and renewal directed toward conformity to his image. By appropriating the liberal Enlightenment notion of negative freedom and participating in its nonconformist resistance to discipline (and hence a resistance to the classical spiritual disciplines),30Christians are in fact being conformed to the patterns of this world (contra Rom. 12:2).
Once we reject the liberal conception of the autonomous agent who resists control and discipline, Foucault’s analyses of the mechanisms of discipline take on a very different light. Admittedly, Foucault seems to suggest that modern society simply took over religious disciplines and rituals and generalized or altered them. Thus he suggests that modern factories resemble medieval monasteries (DP, 149), that modern prisons bear the marks of earlier convents (DP, 243), and that the general structures of a disciplinary society mimic monastic communities (DP, 149). And insofar as the prisons and factories of a disciplinary society are seen as repressive and dominating, the charge flows back against these earlier communities of religious discipline.
How can we respond to this charge? Of course, on the one hand, this simply flows from Foucault’s liberalism, his opposition to domination and control as such. Insofar as we don’t accept such a conception of the autonomous self, the criticism doesn’t hold. But more importantly, on the other hand, this raises a crucial point: while formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically these disciplines and practices are aimed at very different ends. And here we must make an important distinction: we can distinguish good discipline from bad discipline by its telos, its goal or end. So the difference between the disciplines that form us into disciples of Christ and the disciplines of contemporary culture that produce consumers is precisely the goal they are aiming at. Discipline and formation are good insofar as they are directed toward the end, or telos, that is proper to human beings: to glorify God and enjoy him forever (Westminster Catechism, question 1). Or, to put it otherwise, a disciplinary form is proper when it corresponds with the proper end of humanity, which is to be (renewed) image bearers of God. So other forms of disciplinary formation are bad and wrong insofar as they try to mold human beings into something other than what they are called to be. Almost universally these other modes of discipline are reductionistic because they reduce human beings to something less than they are called to be. Some modes of discipline reduce us to economic animals whose primary end is production and consumption; other modes of discipline reduce us to sexual animals whose primary end is instinctual satisfaction; still other modes of disciplinary society try to mold us into violent creatures whose primary end is destruction. What is wrong with all these disciplinary structures is not that they are bent on forming or molding human beings into something, but rather what they are aiming for in that process. Thus it is helpful to distinguish the formal structure of disciplinary formation as such from the specific direction discipline takes.31
Admittedly, as we’ve learned in previous chapters, what constitutes the proper end, or telos, of human formation depends on the ultimate story we tell of what human beings are and what humans are called to be. The Christian story specifies that human beings are creatures whose ultimate telos is to image their Creator and be conformed to the image of his Son. Different stories obviously envision different ends for humanity. So what constitutes good or proper formation must be determined in relation to the particular founding narrative that we confess tells the truth about the world and the human condition. As such, we can draw an important link between Lyotard’s emphasis on the role of narrative and Foucault’s emphasis on the role of formation: discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.
Taking Foucault to Church
Unlike our engagements with Lyotard and Derrida, there is a temptation for Christians to side with Foucault because much of modern Christianity has unwittingly bought into the Enlightenment notion of autonomy. As such, if we’re going to put Foucault’s analysis to work in shaping a postmodern church, we have to stand him on his head a bit: we need to see what he describes but reject what he thinks about disciplinary society as such. If we do that, what exactly does Foucault give us? In what way can he be a catalyst for thinking about a postmodern church?
The Cultural Power of Discipline Formation
Keep in mind that Foucault offers studies of all kinds of practices (from bells ringing to get us to move according to timetables to the use of negative stimuli to get us to stop doing something) that shape and mold human beings to act in a certain way—to be certain kinds of persons. Foucault is absolutely right about the fact that this works! Disciplinary mechanisms in our society do make humans into certain kinds of people who are aimed at particular goals. For instance, many Americans are defined by the primary goal of consumption. They stake their identity on their material possessions—on labels, objects of luxury, and the never-ending process of keeping up with trends. If we look at the way upper-middle-class Americans spend their time and money, we have to conclude that their ultimate goal is to be faithful consumers. How did they get to be that way? How did they become that kind of person? The answer isn’t simple, but we can easily identify several disciplinary practices that form human beings into these consuming animals.
First, the very success of capitalism depends on a consuming culture as market, and particularly a culture that wants ever-new products (otherwise the market becomes quickly saturated and the possibilities of profits quickly diminish). Thus we have a culture—or at least a class within the culture—that has a vested interest in seeing a society of consumers. How does it create this population of consumers? One of the primary ways has been the advent of mass media, which, from its inception, has been aimed at marketing. We must understand, for instance, that television programs were basically invented to gain an audience for commercials. Thus the majority of mass media is undertaken as a means for creating an audience for advertising that will eventually become a market of consumers. Marketing, then, is driven by investing products with social, sexual, and even religious value, which makes them something much more than they are.32In other words, marketing capitalizes on fundamental structural human desires for meaning and transcendence and presents products and services as ways to satisfy these human longings. It then utilizes the tools of disciplinary practice to inject these values into the very character of human beings—internalizing the values so that they become part of the person. By using repetition, images, and other strategies—all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitive or propositional—marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly, as Chief recognized. They are communicated by a world of images and through a range of practices that teach the body, as it were. This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual.
It is absolutely crucial that the church recognize this process. In other words, the first thing we need to learn from Foucault is how pervasive disciplinary formation is within our culture—from public education to MTV. Anyone who raises children will with some degree of reflection recognize that this is the case. Nothing frustrates me more than the “label idolatry” already evident in my children. Indeed, raising children in American culture has made me see and appreciate the forces of disciplinary formation, and the globalization of American values makes this a reality around the world. All of us certainly find ourselves in multiple webs of power relations and subject to multiple disciplinary mechanisms bent on forming us into certain kinds of people. In the world of late-modern capitalism, many of these disciplinary interests coalesce. So those disciplinary mechanisms that would form us into primarily sexual animals have been co-opted by capitalist interests that want to form us into consumers. Everything from beer and deodorant to shampoo and rice is sold on the basis of sex. By unveiling the cultural power of disciplinary formation, Foucault can be a catalyst for the scales falling from our eyes so that we see what is happening.
The Necessity of Counterformation by Counterdisciplines
But beyond simply recognizing that such cultural formation is pervasive, we also need to recognize that the telos, or goal, at which these disciplines aim is fundamentally inconsistent with (and even competing with) the message of the gospel and what it specifies as the proper end of humanity. We need to recognize the inconsistency between how late-modern capitalism defines human beings and how Christian faith defines us. Because of the covertness of this formation, Christians are often not alert to what they are becoming. To use a metaphor that George Barna employed for quite different ends: Christians are sometimes like frogs in a kettle. Reportedly, if you place a frog in a pot of room-temperature water and gradually increase the temperature of the water, even to the boiling point, the frog will not jump out of the kettle, even if it means death. This is either because the frog doesn’t sense the change, or because the change is so gradual it lulls the frog into accepting the environment. So also with the church: because the disciplinary mechanisms of Disney, MTV, and the Gap are so insidious and covert, we don’t recognize the way in which their message—and their vision of the human telos—is shaping our own identity. Christians need first to recognize that disciplinary formation takes place in culture, then second, to recognize the antithesis between the dominant culture’s understanding of the human calling and the biblical understanding of our ultimate vocation.
But the church must also do a third thing: enact countermeasures, counterdisciplines that will form us into the kinds of people that God calls us to be. Too often we imagine that the goal of Christian discipleship is to train us to think the right way, to believe the right things. But the ultimate goal of sanctification and discipleship is to shape us into a certain kind of person: one who is like Jesus, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23), loving God and neighbor, caring for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger (Jer. 22:3; James 1:27). He has shown us what is good and what the Lord requires of us: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God (Mic. 6:8). These are all just translations of the broader human vocation, which is to bear the image of Christ as renewed image bearers of God. The primary aim of discipleship is to create a certain kind of person who acts in a certain way, not someone who simply thinks in a certain way. According to the Scriptures, knowing the truth is only instrumental to ultimately doing the truth (Jer. 22:16).
But how do we become that kind of people? How do I become the kind of person who “does” the truth? It takes practice. First, it requires grace. Because no one is good (no, not one!), being properly directed to our proper telos requires a regeneration and redirection of the heart by the Holy Spirit. That is why they are fruits of the Spirit. Insofar as the Spirit indwells believers, they are being formed into the image of Christ to the extent that they learn to walk in the Spirit and in the Spirit’s power. However, while regeneration is a necessary condition for becoming this kind of person, it is not a sufficient condition. This must be cultivated by practices of sanctification.
Second, recognizing the structural goodness of disciplinary formation, the church must utilize disciplines that will form us into these kinds of people—disciplines that will counteract the formation of MTV and television commercials. We would do well to recover the tradition of spiritual disciplines such as prayer and fasting, meditation, simplicity, and so on as a means of shaping our souls through the rituals of the body. Further, as I’ve already suggested, our corporate worship should be aimed at constituting us as disciples who are countercultural agents of redemption. Communion and confession, foot washing and economic redistribution are ways of practicing what it means to be citizens of the kingdom. And such practices inscribe this telos of the kingdom into our character.33Christian worship is one of the primary arenas in which we participate in the practices that shape who we are. If our worship simply mimics the disciplinary practices and goals of a consumer culture, we will not be formed otherwise. Conceiving of the church as a disciplinary society aimed at forming human beings to reflect the image of Christ, we will offer an alternative society to the hollow formations of late-modern culture.
1. I will refer to the 1975 film directed by Milos Forman but also to the original novel by Ken Kesey (1962; repr., New York: Penguin, 1976). The novel is narrated in the first person from Chief ’s perspective.
Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1. One could also compare the role of ducts in the film Brazil.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Ibid., 181.
5. Ibid., 179.
6. Ibid., 209.
7. This is the (somewhat controversial) interpretation of Foucault offered by James Miller in his Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). Miller argues that Foucault’s theories reflect an outgrowth of his own experiential and experimental sexual escapades.
8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (French original, 1975; repr., New York: Vintage, 1977); henceforth abbreviated in the text as DP.
9. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (French original, 1963; New York: Vintage, 1973). A second French edition appeared in 1972 and was published in English in 1994.
10. As Foucault puts it: “It has been said but you have to understand that when I read—and I know it has been attributed to me—the thesis, ‘Knowledge is power,’ or ‘Power is knowledge,’ I begin to laugh, since studying their relation is precisely my problem. If they were identical, I would not have to study them, and I would be spared a lot of fatigue as a result. The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them” (“Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” an interview reprinted in Critique and Power, ed. Michael Kelly [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994], 133).
11. This is why I suggest below that Foucault’s “genealogy” shares something in common with presuppositionalist approaches to epistemology, which emphasize the role of “control beliefs” [Wolterstorff] in the constitution of knowledge.
12. Christians, aware of the deep structural effects of sin, should also operate with a hermeneutics of suspicion, even if suspicion doesn’t get the last (or first) word. For discussions along these lines, with an eye on practice, see Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1998).
13. Foucault unpacks this method most carefully in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
14. Ibid., 142.
15. “The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself ” (ibid., 147).
16. Ibid., 150, emphasis added.
17. One of the most important aspects of the panopticon was this asymmetry, which allowed the “subjects” to be seen but not the observers. The subject “is seen, but he does not see” (DP, 200). This invisibility of the observers also means that they need not always be observing: “for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed,” that he might be the subject of observation at any moment (DP, 201). Cf. the words written on the cell walls at Mettray: “God sees you.” The panopticon is the substitution for an omniscient deity (or Santa!).
18. Foucault analyzes these other social institutions, especially in the chapter titled “Docile Bodies” (III.1).
19. This is powerfully illustrated in another film, Brazil.
20. One can see all of these at work in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
21. Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 47. All of this is undertaken under the banner of “democracy” (ibid.).
22. It is not accidental that David Macey’s landmark biography is titled The Lives of Michel Foucault, in the plural.
23. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”
24. Foucault articulates this very clearly in lectures and interviews collected in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1997).
25. See especially the lectures collected in The Politics of Truth.
26. The term liberal is used in a more restrictive sense in American political parlance. But it is important to recognize that, with respect to the tradition of political liberalism I am describing here, both Democrats and Republicans are liberals. It is just that their “Hands off!” stances apply to different things: a Democrat is more likely to assert, “Hands off my body—I can do what I want with it!”; a Republican is more likely to assert, “Get your grubby tax-collecting hands off my money—it’s mine to do what I want with it!” These are two points on the same liberal continuum.
27. Although I am sympathetic to his critique, I worry, for instance, that Spencer Burke’s critique of the church has absorbed some version of this penchant for liberal autonomy. See Spencer Burke, “From the Third Floor to the Garage,” in Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 27–39. I worry that what is being offered is a spiritual version of Chief ’s escape from the institution into the “freedom” of the wilderness.
28. That said, we should also honor the complexity of situations that give rise to nondenominational churches. Some, no doubt, emerge from denominations that have become so static and modern that the denomination is no longer a link to the catholic tradition but rather a reified modernist institution. Not all denominations represent a link to the great catholic tradition; this is especially true of anti-creedal Protestant denominations that emerged in modernity. Vis-à-vis these, nondenominational congregations could actually provide the opportunity to be more catholic. However, nondenominational churches must grapple with how to connect with the normativity of the catholic tradition. My thanks to Brian McLaren for helping me to complexify these matters.
29. This is why Foucault tends to resist being described as a Marxist; he thinks the Marxist conception of power in society is too simplistic, boiling down to a structure of haves and have-nots. But for Foucault, even the oppressors are effects of power, just as Nurse Ratched is an effect of the system, a product of the Combine.
30. The very notion of spiritual disciplines remains foreign and even anathema to many evangelicals. However, there are signs of a shift, engendered in large part by Richard J. Foster’s classic, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).
31. For a nuanced, brilliant account of these matters, drawing on Foucault, see Daniel M. Bell Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering, Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2001). I discuss this in some detail in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 243–54.
32. For a very helpful and insightful discussion of the religious nature of advertising, see Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1999), chap. 23. See also Jean Kilbourne, Can’t Buy My Love (New York: Free Press, 2000); and her video series Still Killing Us Softly; and James B. Twitchell, Adcult U.S.A.: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
33. For further discussion of worship as a means of forming character, see Marva Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), chap. 6; Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 107–10; and Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 235–39.