Reflections on Time and Politics

15. Discipline and Normalization

15 Discipline and Normalization foucault is often credited with the view that power fixes and imposes identities on its subjects, while resistance, which may be considered a form of power, opposes this first power and thereby dissolves or deconstructs power’s identity formations.1 This use of identity as a central term around which power and resistance operate may seem compatible with Foucault’s main criticisms of traditional juridico-discursive models of power: that these models fail to appreciate power’s positive and productive nature, its differing micro- and macrolevels of operation, and its most complex strategies, which go far beyond those of law and restriction. Yet such readings ulti1 . Many of these interpretations both ascribe to Foucault an opposition of power and resistance and affirm such an opposition while criticizing Foucault for failing to sustain it. Examples are found in certain normatively oriented theories, variants of which are advanced by Habermas and some feminist political theorists, which seek to justify opposition to dominating forms of power. Here power is seen to fix, repress, and dominate, and Foucault is, in some cases, applauded for demonstrating that certain identities often taken as pregiven or natural—such as those relating to the female body—are actually constituted by this power. Nevertheless, according to these readings, Foucault’s thesis of omnipresent power disciplining subjects into socially constituted identities precludes the possibility of any resistance that could oppose power, either because it provides no space for this resistance or because it provides no foundation for a critique of power as domination and thereby falls into relativism . Even Foucault supposedly found this analytic inadequate, which explains his apparent reversal between his writings on power and his writings on the self. Interpretations that follow this pattern include Habermas (1987, 266–92), Fraser (1989), Hartsock (1990), and MacNay (1992). Another reading, given by certain poststructuralist thinkers such as Judith Butler, supports the view that no simple outside to power exists but makes space for opposing resistance by denying that Foucauldian power can be restricted to domination and repression. It thereby affirms that, for Foucault, resistance is internal to power, but it still accuses Foucault of failing to sustain this view and of ultimately seeking to anchor resistance somewhere outside of power—for example, in bodies and pleasures. See Butler (1987, 217–29; 1990, 93–106). Some readings that take this critical view hold that Foucault fails to locate the site of resistance in a Lacanian-style structural Lack residing within power relations. See, for example, Newman (2001, chapter 4). 158 Reflections on Time and Politics mately link the analytic of power to the very will to truth Foucault contests by making identity central to the truths and meanings constructed by power. At times Foucault seems to encourage this oppositional understanding. In ‘‘The Subject and Power,’’ for example, he holds that a new analysis of power relations would ‘‘tak[e] the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point,’’ and maintains that these resistances ‘‘attack everything which . . . forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way’’ (Foucault 1982, 211–12). But Foucault immediately qualifies this apparent opposition of power and resistance , adding that these resistances ‘‘are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification. . . . What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power. In short, the régime du savoir’’ (212). What contemporary forms of resistance challenge, therefore, are not power relations as such, but a knowledge regime that ties the individual in a constraining way to his or her identity. The importance of this subtle shift from power to a power/knowledge regime becomes clear when Foucault examines the efficacy of power relations and denies that this process of fixing is ever really power’s aim or effect: modern society, he argues, is disciplinary—a fact that, of course, requires a knowledge regime that delineates standards of normality and deviancy against which individuals are subjected—but it is not disciplined . What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after—more and more rational and economic— between productive activities...