A Foucault Primer by McHoul Alec & Grace Wendy

Author:McHoul, Alec & Grace, Wendy [McHoul, Alec]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136996948
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

By using the term ‘discipline’ to designate these training procedures, Foucault stresses also the connections between these techniques of power and the forms of knowledge that developed alongside them. As mentioned previously, knowledge gained on the basis of disciplinary power is formulated according to ‘norms’ of behaviour. But what is centrally at issue is the types of instruments and procedures that harness the accumulation of knowledge. They all involve some form of unequal intercourse between two agents or parties. In the case of observation, the traffic of surveillance travels only one way: towards the subject upon whom the technique is exercised. The subject of surveillance does not have the reciprocal power to ‘observe’ the observer. Likewise, in the case of those normalising judgements which determine an individual’s level of ‘deviancy’, one person has the capacity to judge someone else on the basis of knowledge that only the former possesses. And in the case of examinations, it is only the subject of power who undergoes this trial; it is set by someone already possessing the skills or knowledge the other is seeking.

According to Foucault (1980a: 105), disciplinary power was one of the great ‘inventions’ of bourgeois society and is the primary means whereby the ‘cohesion’ of this type of social body is ensured and maintained. But disciplinary power cannot thereby be seen simply to ‘reflect’ the requirements of the economic (capitalist) base. Foucault thus challenges those Marxist conceptions of modernity which claim that economic forces determine other social factors—at least ‘in the last instance’. Foucault argued on a number of occasions that power is a much more ‘material’ force than the exigencies demanded by economic priorities. Disciplinary power played an indispensable role in the constitution of industrial capitalism, while simultaneously determining the characteristics of ‘bourgeois’ life.

Returning to Foucault’s assessment that modem society ushered in the age of the government of ‘life’ and ‘life-processes’, we can see that the techniques associated with disciplinary power must exist at least logically prior to the employment of other technologies for other purposes—such as the accumulation of capital. In directing power at the level of life itself, one aims to optimise its forces and aptitudes in order to mould them towards certain goals and particular ends. Discipline produces ‘practised’ bodies; it ‘increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)’ (1977a: 138). Capitalism would not have been possible without the controlled ‘insertion’ of bodies into the production processes. Men and women had first to be ‘accumulated’ via the types of techniques of power we have discussed. In any case, it is probably more useful not to separate the two phenomena:

In fact, the two processes—the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital—cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital.

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