Post Scriptum: The Non-efficient Citizen: Identity and Consumerist Morality

Abstract

Elaborating upon the concept of panopticism, Michel Foucault analyses the phenomenon of examination. According to him, examination is essentially meant to control individuals rather than test their knowledge:

The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a “case”: a case which at one and the same time constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power. The case is no longer, as in casuistry or jurisprudence, a set of circumstances defining an act and capable of modifying the application of a rule; it is the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.⁴⁹⁵

Foucault seeks to demythologize the social order of Western civilization, ostensibly socially progressive and morally positive. He does that by foregrounding how this social order is regulated by various disciplines. Discipline is a core concept in Foucault: not only are we disciplined, but our individuality is regulated and controlled. In what follows, I want to examine the dilemma when the individual exercises the moral right to choose individual identity but is dependent on a social order grounded in control. In other words, does the consumerist social order really allow the individual to select individual identity?