In a footnote in Reassembling the Social Latour writes of Foucault:

No one was more precise in his analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations. And yet, as soon as Foucault as translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had ‘revealed’ power relations behind every innocuous activity: madness, natural history, sex, administration, etc. This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought: even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.

Power relations are not behind anything, but constituted in things. This analytical Foucault appeals to me, and it’s why The Archaeology of Knowledge remains my favourite of his books (that I’ve read). Cousins and Hussein remark that the book, essentially a methodological treatise, “is a curiously underexploited text, not least by Foucault himself.” I would guess this is because of the inversion that Latour notes.

Sorry this has all been just words recently. I’ll find some pretty pictures to post.