2 - Disciplinary power

Summary

Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in 1975, contains his most famous and elaborate exposition of disciplinary power. A bird's-eye view of his preceding and succeeding analyses reveals, however, that this concept arose in overlapping stages and served a variety of purposes. From roughly 1973 to 1976, in analyses of punishment, proto-psychiatry, criminology and race war, Foucault attempted to articulate disciplinary power in contradistinction to sovereign power. From about 1976 to 1979, he used disciplinary power as a springboard for delineating modalities of power concerned with population, namely, biopolitics, security and governmentality. Finally, in the early 1980s disciplinary power figured more as an implicit background to his analyses of subjectivity in Greco-Roman antiquity and early Christianity. The long shadow cast by this concept renders it absolutely crucial to understanding the trajectory of Foucault's thought.

Using a composite account of disciplinary power drawn from Foucault's seminal presentation in Discipline and Punish as well as his Collège de France course for the academic year 1973–74, Psychiatric Power, I will provide an overview of disciplinary power and then exemplify the exercise of this power through Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. Taylor's Principles, which influenced American and European industrialists as well as Lenin and Antonio Gramsci, enriches our understanding of disciplinary power in two ways. First, the presentation of scientific management at the core of Principles reflects nothing short of a full-fledged disciplinary programme.