*** I HOPE THIS IS GOING TO THE RIGHT ADDRESS. IF NOT, I'M SORRY, AND
PLESE LET ME KNOW. THANKS
SAM***
On Tue, Jun 11, 1996 11:04:08 AM, Koray Caliskan wrote:
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 13:58:29 +0400 (MEDT)
>From: Koray Caliskan <caliskak@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: sbinkley@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>Cc: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Foucault vs. Marx
>
>Dear Sam,
>
>I know that it is a little bit late but let me comment on what you have
>written in 2nd. of April.
>
>You wrote: "The relations of exploitation Marx analyzes are the
> Macro-Pysics (a term Foucault never uses, though he could have)
> as opposed to Micro-Physics of disciplinary power."
>
>But yesterday I realized that Foucault has also used this concept in D&P.
>
>He wrote: "These two great discoveries of the 18th. Cent -the progress of
>societies and the geneses of individuals- were perhaps correlative with
>the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of
>administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation,
>synthesis and totalization. A Macro- and a Micro-Physics of power made
>possible not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that),
>but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continious, cumulative
>dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of dominations."
>
> Michel Foucault
> Discipline and Punish
> Penguin Books, 1982,
> p:160.
> (in the Organization of Geneses)
>
>So I would like to ask, does your argument still hold? If so how?
>Can you restate that it is macro-pysics of power that Marx has dealt with?
>Or, Does Foucault have something different in his mind while referring to
>Macro-Physics of Power?
>
>Thanking you in advance.
>Cheers.
>
>Koray Caliskan
>Grad. Student
>Bosphorus University
>Dept. of Political Science
>
>
Koray:
So he DID use macro physics.
The question of the interaction of these two stratas of power is difficult
to ascertain. What is interesting to me (and I can state this only on a
very general level at this point) is that: in keeping macro (the global
development of capital, the spread of the factory system, the establishment
of wage labor market) (or, on the political side, the liberalization and
distribution of individual rights....) distinct from the micro (the
normative disciplinary systems of distribution and control.... the
"political ecomony of bodies) Foucault seems to make it possible to
continue to study the former as distinct from the latter.
In other words, Those political and methodological strategies we associate
with the "macro" are not simply negated once we realize that the real
source of our oppression is in the unobtrusive structure of (panoptic)
architecture.
I'm not exactly sure what you are pointing out here. I think I need to be
refreshed as to my original argumnet.
However, it seems to me that this distinction, as I've described it, is a
little too tidy. I think we have to remember that the macro is the
mechanism for the expansion and distribution of the micro.... panopitcism
could not have been universalized and become so deeply integrated without
the expansion of various institutions and techiques.
Okay: here's a paragraph from a short piece I wrote on this last semsester:
These procedures of disciplinary regulation combined to form an apparatus
for the control of the body whose thrift and utility promised more
effecient control with less policing apparatus and overhead expense, and
ultimately came to replace the older forms of ritual terror and public
punishment. However, it must be emphasized that the rise of disciplinary
power is not localizable in the ascendance of one class, one technique of
production or one policing practice. "'Discipline' may be identified
neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a
modality for its exercises, comprising a wide set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; its is a 'physics'
or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology." (215) Its rise is due not to its
having "...replaced all others, but because it has infiltrated the others,
sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them,
linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to
bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements." (216)
So "infiltration" is the operative term in describing this connection.
How does this sound?
sb