Zed Books Foucault with Marx

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Foucault With MarxBy Jacques Bidet, Steven CorcoranZed Books LtdCopyright © 2015 La fabrique éditionsAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-538-5ContentsNote on the translation, Abbreviations, INTRODUCTION: WHY UNITE MARX AND FOUCAULT, AND HOW?, 1 THE MARX/FOUCAULT DIFFERENCE: DISCIPLINE AND GOVERNMENTALITY, 2 PROPERTY-POWER AND KNOWLEDGE-POWER, 3 MARXIAN STRUCTURALISM AND FOUCAULDIAN NOMINALISM?, 4 MARX'S 'CAPITALISM' AND FOUCAULT'S 'LIBERALISM', ELEMENTS OF CONCLUSION: A STRATEGY FROM BELOW, Marx's strategies, Foucault's strategies, Provocation and interpellation, Strategy and hegemony, The dispersed order of strategy from below, Beyond class horizons, References, Index, CHAPTER 1THE MARX/FOUCAULT DIFFERENCE: DISCIPLINE AND GOVERNMENTALITYPrior to undertaking a systematic comparison, I propose to explore some analogies and discrepancies between the respective universes of Marx and Foucault, which appear through a reading of the lectures given at the Collège de France throughout the 1970s: that is, on the one hand, Discipline and Punish, and, on the other, Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics. In the lectures from 1972 to 1974, on which Discipline and Punish draws, Foucault rather explicitly sets things in the context of a 'class' society, into which, however, he introduces a new paradigm, the 'disciplinary order'. In the lectures from 1977 to 1979, to which the latter two titles correspond, he situates himself in the field of theories and technologies of power: his approach no longer develops in terms of 'class relationships', but instead of 'relationships of government'.1.1 DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY/CLASS SOCIETY: SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT1.1.1 Foucault's discovery of a new social orderDiscipline and Punish explores the new penal and disciplinary order that appears in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. In the case of France, the justice system of the Ancien Régime has been done away with, including its secret procedures and its art of extracting proofs of confession, all crowned with a spectacle of torture in which royal power is restored through terror.The new system is grounded in public debate under the authority of a judge who is supposedly there to prevent and correct. Execution is handed to a separate administration. Corporeal punishment is equal for all. Inflicted on a juridical subject, it consists in taking away the ultimate freedom of one's life, simply by using the horological mechanism of the guillotine. To this abstract universe of sanction corresponds a concrete individualisation of the sanctioned person. Now one no longer judges the crime but rather the criminal individual, deemed such at the outcome of a 'scientific' procedure into which the psychiatrist, as the judge of the subject's normality and of possible attenuating circumstances, would soon be introduced.The ordeal of the prison becomes the standard form of punishment. Foucault recasts it within a broader logic, which is referred to as that of 'discipline' and is deemed to be common to barracks, factories, hospitals and schools. Military discipline, which produces a man-machine subject to a strict hierarchy, merely figures as the distillate of a phenomenon affecting all social institutions. We have here the invention of an abstract space stamped by the closure of the whole and its sub-sections, with functional quartering, the marking out of places to fix the respective terrains for each component of the group, and their comings and goings. A collective temporal rhythm is imposed on everyone, with employment and the exhaustive utilisation of time divided into standardised acts and exercises. There is a dividing up of tasks, of stages. This is not the abstraction of the market: it is, such is at least the argument I'm putting forward, 'another abstraction', namely organisation.The 'panoptic' apparatus, utopia realised, enables the total control and monitoring of