essary to construct a history of what happens in the nineteenth century and how the present highly-complex relation of forces--the current outline of the battle--has been arrived at through a succession of offensives and counter offensives, effects and counter-effects. The coherence of such a history does not derive from the revelation of a project but from a logic or opposing strategies. The archaeology of the human sciences has to be established through studying the mechanisms of power which have invested human bodies, acts and forms of behaviour. And this investigation enables us to rediscover one of the conditions of the emergence of the human sciences: the great nineteenth-century effort in discipline and normalization (Foucault, 1980, p. 61).
What is most crucial about the prevailing perception of social forms is that it is encased in a reified ideology of cultural values (norms). The ideology, which may change details of manifestation from time to time, both permeates culture and absorbs it, and prevailing ideology (which Foucault finds on the whole pernicious) is enacted in the language of the culture as well as in customs that are themselves enacted in social relationships. "Truth," he explains, "is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
And it induces regular effects of power. 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" (1980, p. 131).
Further to this point, Foucault cites some of his earlier social analysis, in which he says he "wanted to locate the rules that formed a certain number of concepts and theoretical relationships in their [Marx and Buffon] works . . . . I wanted to determine . . . the functional conditions of specific discursive practices" (Foucault, 1977, pp. 114-5). Elsewhere he speaks of his "effort to situate comprehensive discursive units, such...