Disciplinary Power

Abstract

The trajectory of the discussion so far has taken the analysis steadily further away from the individuals on whom the first mode of power is centred: by-passing confrontations between them in the second mode of power, disciplining and constraining them in organisation in the third, and constituting them in the fourth. In this fifth, and final, part of my framework, power becomes more anonymous still, and yet there is a sense in which I come full circle to focus once again on the individual: in particular on how individuals are forged and invested with the capacities to be effective political actors. This mode of power, which I will call Disciplinary Power, draws on the work of Michel Foucault and those inspired by it, especially contemporary feminist scholars. It shares some common ground with Bureaucratic Power because of its concern with the consistent and regularised operation of systems of control, and with Constitutive Power, especially in its focus on power’s more ‘productive’ side. However, it fleshes out and deepens the understanding of power developed by these third and fourth modes in important ways. It provides the specifics of how the kind of control that Bureaucratic Power represents actually is applied at a detailed bodily level. It homes in on the fine-grained micro-processes of power, to elaborate Constitutive Power’s macroscopic emphasis with empirical detail. My analysis in this chapter therefore seeks to identify the specific means by which control is exercised and subjectivity is sustained and reinforced.