Dean, Mitchell. Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods of Historical Sociology. London: Routledge, 1994. 157.

These notions of super- and infra-structures remain metaphorical if rich in polemical ramifications and provocations. I do not think that they can be inscribed in analysis. In his later writings on governmentality, Foucault would come to a more satisfactory formulation. This view is confirmed by the fact that even at this phase there are limits to their use. Foucault readily jettisons them when they do not suit his purposes. In Discipline and Punish (1977a: 222-3), for instance, he entertains the suggestion that “the disciplines constituted nothing more than an infra-law,” only to reject the notion and argue that they should be regarded as a “counter-law,” in that they do not simply extend the forms defined by laws into the micro-level but actually undermine the limits of the law. In so far as the law, the juridical system, and the state, appear to occupy the same plane within Foucault’s analysis, this example suggests limits to the notion of discipline as playing an infrastructural role to the law and state.