Disciplinary power

Disciplinary power is a theoretical concept developed by Michel Foucault to describe political power from a point of view antagonistic to that of the classical theory of power.

Classical theory

The classical theory of power builds the models of its analysis from sovereignty. Thus, Aristotle's typology is built based on how many individuals hold power (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy or tyranny, oligarchy and demagogy) and for what purposes (pure and impure forms). From the end of the XVII century and beginning of the XVIII the figure of the contract begins to describe the origin of governments as a transfer of the sovereignty of the citizens to the authorities. Power is thought of as a transferable and also revocable property, but the most important thing is that, in the balance of power, on the side of authority is everything, and on the side of citizenship is nothing (there are exceptions, but they are not more other than that, any comment on the relevance of citizens only takes place after a "but")

Foucault's concept

Foucault, heir to another theoretical legacy, observes power from an opposite point of view. Not from their terminal forms (consolidated institutions), but from their capillary forms, their founding roots. This non-sovereign power, foreign to the form of sovereignty, is disciplinary power. In turn, the particularities of the concept of disciplinary power in Foucault arise from the relational conception. That is, power is not conceived analogously to property, not even as a power, but as a relationship that can and should be studied only through the terms between which it operates. This look implies a whole new description of the concept of power.

Discipline, unlike sovereignty, does not revolve around the legal rule, but the natural rule (the norm) and therefore, its code is not that of the law but that of normalization, and It is characterized by being the creator of apparatuses of knowledge and knowledge. Its theoretical horizon is not that of the legal building, but that of the human sciences, and its jurisprudence is that of clinical knowledge.

Examples

The law may prohibit the child from not attending school, but behind the scenes, the juridical-legal power has little or nothing to say. At most it clarifies that the same prohibitions are valid inside the school as outside it. However, by virtue of its level of capillary application, the disciplinary power establishes what is the optimal arrangement of student benches in schools, their best posture when listening or writing in accordance with the norm scientifically established and other regulations of a similar nature.

The same goes for prisons. The juridical-legal power dictates who should be (made) prisoner, who goes to jail, for how long, etc. However, the architectural layout of the prisons is determined based on the optimal possibility, technically speaking, for its control, to the point of calculating the implications of said layout on the psyche of the inmates. Bentham's panopticon cannot be ruled by any judge, since he exceeds his powers. Technical efficacy is another of the properties of disciplinary power, which calculates the use and application of power with maximum efficiency.

Origins

Foucault locates the birth of disciplinary power in the 18th century and its aftermath. It seems that, in his words:

“The power that had as a modality, as an organizational scheme, sovereignty, would have been unable to govern the economic and political body of a society entering a phase of demographic explosion and industrialization, so that the old mechanics of power escaped many things, up and down, at the level of individuals and at the level of the mass. A first adaptation of power mechanisms, aimed at monitoring and training, took place in order to recover the particular. Discipline is born this way. Thus, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the first one performed, although only at the local level, empirically, fractionated and within the limited framework of the school, the hospital, the barracks, the factory. ”

In Divise and Punish, Foucault lists how with the mass production of the rifle and its introduction into armies, the individual acquired a new strategic relevance as a result of his ability to eliminate a greater number of enemies. This relevance made the need for a readaptation of the habitual training and training tactics imperative. The precision in regulating the movements of the armed forces increased significantly. It is a disciplinary technology, a technology of the individualized body as an organism. This is the object of disciplinary power. And its objective is to manipulate the body as a source of forces that must be made useful and docile.

However, the capillary degree of power should not deceive about its degree of intentionality and scope of its effects. Precisely, because it was born and applied locally, it cannot generate gigantic domination networks of conspiratorial proportions. In the third chapter of the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucault describes power as intentional, but objective. That is to say, although at a certain moment a certain mechanism of power is created with certain intentions and taking into account certain effects, the complex combination of multiple techniques of the exercise of power generates a result that is not the product, in its entirety, of the will. originating from the subject. To carry out this objective, the control of the subjects on another higher scale, another type of power arises, biopower.

Links

• Wikiquote hosts famous phrases of or over Disciplinary power.
• Country-Global