The New Way of the World by Pierre Dardot

Author:Pierre Dardot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

DISCIPLINE (1): A NEW SYSTEM OF DISCIPLINES

The very concept of governmentality – acting on the actions of individuals who are supposedly free to choose – makes it possible to redefine discipline as a technique of government peculiar to market societies. The term discipline may be a cause for surprise here. It implies, seemingly at any rate, a certain reorientation vis-à-vis the meaning given it by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, where he applies it to the techniques of spatial distribution, classification and training of individual bodies. For Foucault, the model of discipline was Bentham’s Panopticon. However, far from contrasting ‘discipline’, ‘normalization’ and ‘control’, as some exegeses have argued, Foucault’s reflections more and more clearly reveal the matrix of this new form of ‘conduct of conducts’, which can vary, depending on the case under consideration, from imprisoning prisoners to monitoring the quality of products sold on the market.51 If ‘to govern is to structure the potential field of action of others’, discipline can be redefined more widely as a set of techniques for structuring the field of action, which differ depending on the situation in which individuals find themselves.52

From the classical age of disciplines onwards, power therefore cannot be exercised by sheer coercion of a body. It must go hand in hand with individual desire by bringing all the springs of what Bentham called ‘influence’ into operation. This assumes that it enters into individual calculation; that it even participates in it, to act on the imaginary anticipations of individuals: to strengthen desire (through rewards), to weaken it (through punishment), to divert it (by substituting objects).

This logic, which consists in indirectly directing conduct, is the horizon of neo-liberal strategies for promoting ‘freedom to choose’. Their necessarily normative dimension is not always appreciated. ‘Freedom to choose’ is in fact identified with the obligation to engage in maximizing conduct in a legal, institutional, regulatory, architectural, relational framework, which is to be precisely constructed so that the individual chooses ‘in complete freedom’ what he must necessarily choose in his own interest. The whole secret of the art of power, Bentham said, is to act in such a way that the individual pursues his self-interest as if it were his duty and vice-versa.

Three aspects of neo-liberal disciplines should be distinguished. The freedom of economic subjects first of all presupposes the security of contracts and the fixing of a stable framework. Neo-liberal discipline leads to extending the field of action to be stabilized through fixed rules. The constitution of a framework that is not only legal, but also budgetary and monetary, is to stop subjects from anticipating variations in economic policy – that is, from making these variations objects of anticipation. This amounts to saying that individual calculation must be able to rely on a stable market order, which excludes making the framework itself an object of calculation.

Neo-liberal strategy53 then consists in creating the maximum number of market situations – that is, in organizing by various means (privatization, creating competition between public services, ‘marketization’ of schools or hospitals, making money available via private debt) the ‘obligation to choose’.

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