volume -- realized here, we believe -- is to collect studies that not only
read but apply Foucault. The focus of that application in the present
volume is the question of the institution, including specific questions put
to specific institutions such as the university and the workplace.

Our Introduction to this collection will do some normalizing of its
own, we hope for the reader's benefit. We begin by normalizing the real
author-ity here -- Foucault -- by briefly highlighting some of the most
important theoretical strategies his works offer, especially those on which
our other authors have drawn. We will focus, as the essays do, on
Foucault's genealogical terms (normalization, power/knowledge) and then
on resources his work suggests for critical practice, intervention, or
resistance. Our Acknowledgments are ushered in by our Admonitions.
Treat the Introduction as you would the book, reading by your own lights
and to your own order. We have arranged the volume in a way that suits
us; its pages can clearly be read in any order that pleases you.

The connection between Foucault and institutions seems an obvious one,
but not because he wanted to make the institution the basic unit of
analysis. On the contrary, Foucault situated institutions within the thin
but all-entangling web of power relations. He did so explicitly in Discipline
and Punish, and he subsequently read his later analysis between the lines of
his earlier works. In this genealogy, institutions are the more readily
definable macro-objects, grosser instruments for the finer, more elemental
workings of power. Power is the thin, inescapable film that covers all
human interactions, whether inside institutions or out. Institutional
structures are saturated with sexual relations, economic relations, social
relations, etc., and are always established of these power relations:
relations between men and women, old and young, senior and junior,
well-born and starved, colorless and colored, Occident and Orient.
Institutions are the means that power uses, and not the other way around,
not sources or origins of power. The analysis of power is thus always more
fine-grained than any analysis of classes, of states, or of institutions in
their own terms would be. That is why for Foucault -- and for all of the
studies that follow here -- the workings of power cannot be described
from the standpoint of a master discipline, especially a perspective that

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