Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994.
In other words , power was no longer conceived by Foucault as an external force that exerted itself on society, but as immanent within society, the “fine, differentiated, continuous ” network of uneven relations that constituted the very matter of the sociaL Society now neatly coincided with a regime of power relations, and the former was thus conceived to structure itself by itself rather than to be structured by an external power. Now, it is this notion of immanence, this conception of a cause that is immanent within the field of its effects, with which this book quarrels and repeatedly condemns as historicist.
Yet some notion of transcendence is plainly needed if one is to avoid the reduction of social space to the relations that fill it. A rethinking of this notion is foreclosed, however, by Foucault’s substitution of a battle based model of analysis for the language based one he inherited from structuralism and which he emphatically rejects for what he takes to be its inherent idealism. In fact the opposite is true; it is the rejection of the linguistic model, properly conceived, that leads to idealism. For the argument behind the adoption of this model-something cannot be claimed to exist unless it can first be stated, articulated in language — is no mere tautology; it is a materialist argument parallel to the rule of science which states that no object can be legitimately posited unless one can also specify the technical means of locating it. The existence of a thing materially depends on its being articulated in language, for only in this case can it be said to have an objective — that is to say, a verifiable — existence, one that can be debated by others. 7-8
[A]n acknowledgment of metalanguage’s impossibility compels us to realize that the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment; no diagram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all. At the same time this acknowledgment does not compel us to imagine a society that never quite forms, where — as the deconstructionists would have it — events never quite take place, a society about which we can say nothing and do so in an endless succession of statements that forever fail to come around to the same relevant point. To say that there is no metalanguage is to say, rather, that society never stops realizing itself, that it continues to be formed over time. 8-9
For, what we do when we recognize the impossibility of meta language is to split society between its appearance — the positive relations and facts we observe in it — and its being, that is to say, its generative principle, which cannot appear among these relations. What we do, in essence, is install society’s generative principle, provide for it a place beyond ‘the . .realm of positive appearances. Fitted out thus with a generative principle, society ceases to be conceived as a dead structure, mappable on some flat surface; society is finally by this means brought to life. 9
… the generative principle of a society is never statable as such, the way the contents of that society are. It is only a certain quashing of its force or blockage in its functioning that allows us to suppose a regime of power to be governed by a principle that cannot be absorbed by that regime. We must not fail to notice that this says more than we have been claiming up until this point. Our position notes not only the negative fact that its principle cannot be made visible within a functioning regime but another, positive fact as well:
the principle of a regime’s institution always in some way negates the regime it institutes . 10
If all this has become a bit too abstract, I invite you to picture it another way. Let us return to May 1968 and the dissenting students, not writing their revolutionary slogans this time but watching with bemusement and an exasperation mounting to disbelief as one of their professors draws on the blackboard four cryptic diagrams that he calls “the four discourses .” The professor is, as you’ve guessed, Jacques Lacan, and many of the students gathered before him are unquestionably thinking that what they are witnessing is the very epitome of that academic structuralism against which they are now in revolt. But they are mistaken about this, and, unfortuntely, others after them will perpetuate their error. Lacan’s diagrams bear no resemblance to the scientistic maps drawn by the structuralists; his diagrams are offered to the audience as antistructuralist.