Theoria

Todd May reviews Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault (thanks Jeremy):

Nealon argues here that the explanation for the changes in power’s operation is its increasing efficiency through intensification.  Sovereign power was brutal but clumsy.  Social power was better, but was brought to greater efficiency by discipline, which, Nealon claims, acts not so much upon the body as upon actions.  Discipline’s ability to intervene upon most, or at least many, actions allows it to suffuse itself throughout the body and the body politic.  Moreover, discipline, unlike sovereign power, can create actions, not just suppress them.  However, biopower is the most intense, therefore most efficient form of power.  It acts directly upon life.  Where discipline uses the force of power to effect the creation of action, biopower intervenes on life at all levels, working through norms in order to shepherd life in directions that he treats in the following chapters.

Although I am fascinated by what Nealon does with this reading of Foucault in the following chapters, I must admit some discomfort with it as an interpretation of Foucault.  I have two reservations here, one that might be called interpretive and one that might be called metainterpretive.  The interpretive reservation has to do with the periodization Nealon lays out.  On this periodization, discipline bears upon actions while biopower concerns norms.  As he writes, “the disciplinary criminal is known through her transgressive deeds, while biopower’s delinquent is known through his abnormal personality” (p. 47).  I believe this is a mistaken interpretation.  For Foucault, it is precisely discipline that works through personalities and norms.  He writes,

Behind the offender . . . stands the delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical investigation.  The introduction of the ‘biographical’ is important in the history of penality.  Because it establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime and even outside it.  (Discipline and Punish, p. 252) 

And elsewhere he states, “The power of the Norm appears throughout the disciplines” (Discipline and Punish, p. 184).

Foucault’s view, as I see it, is that discipline is one part of biopower.  Near the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault writes, “starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms. . .  One of these poles . . . centered on the body as a machine. . .  The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body” (History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 139).  There are two aspects to biopower.  One of those involves individualizing discipline, and the other involves an intervention into life of the kind Nealon calls biopower.  Therefore, discipline is actually a part of biopower.

Admittedly, I haven’t yet read Nealon’s book, but I completely agree with May’s point – Foucault most certainly does not present a “stagest” account of power (c.f., Deleuze’s strange reading in piece on societies of control).