Sovereign Power and Disciplinary Power

As mentioned above, I will now provide a general overview on the sovereign power and disciplinary power respectively. By so doing, I intend to reveal the quite remarkable disparities between the two as a preliminary step to the successive discussion of biopower.

Chronologically, Foucault categorizes all power relations into three modes:

sovereign power, disciplinary power, and the focus of the current chapter: biopower.

The sovereign power, as Foucault explicates in the first part of Discipline and Punish and the last part of Society Must Be Defended, stands for the form of power involved with the monarchial sovereignty that is customarily exercised by kings, rulers, emperors or presidents—those who possess the right to take life or let live, or, the right of life and death. Such a right to decide life and death, however, has always been exercised asymmetrically, for ―the balance is always tipped in favor of death.

Sovereign power‘s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill . . . . The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill‖ (Society Must Be Defended 240). Accordingly, the right to let live has always been entirely neglected, for it would be preposterous to expect the sovereign power to ―grant life in the same way that he can inflict death‖ (240). Also, the sovereign power is exercised substantially by the principle of what Foucault calls deduction (prélèvement). To be more specific, the sovereign power is ―essentially a right of seizure‖ (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction 136), a mechanism which deduces or subtracts

―things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it‖ (ibid.).

Aside from the sovereign power, a new mechanism of power emerged in the eighteenth century, namely, the disciplinary power. Foucault analyzes explicitly in detail about this new technique of power in one of his representative works,

Discipline and Punish (1975). Stepping into the splendid autumn of his life, Foucault canonizes this book confidently as his ―first book‖ that witnesses the zenith of his academic career. The American philosopher James Miller who authored the biography of Foucault, elucidates the historical background as well as its value of the masterpiece in The Passion of Michel Foucault:

Conceived during the most militant period of Foucault‘s activism with the French Maoists and the Groupe d‘Information sur les Prisons, it was composed between 1972 and 1947, at a time when the French ultra-left found itself in retreat and disarray. Foucault‘s most important essay in political theory, the text stages ―multiple impossibilities,‖ condemning humanism, implicitly justifying popular violence—and forcing the reader to grapple with the problematic role of hate and aggression in modern society, and in the modern psyche. (208-09)

Foucault‘s attempt at ―condemning humanism,‖ then, is conducted by his comparison between the modern and premodern modalities of punishment. It has been widely hailed and celebrated to abandon the violent and savage way of punishment utilized to exert on ―the body and blood‖ (Discipline and Punish 16) in the premodern societies.

A more ―humanized‖ form seemed to be adopted with ―less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‗humanity‘‖ (16). However, such a display of ―humanity‖

is, according to Foucault, a sheer camouflage of a more subtle and astute artifice. In tandem with the disappearance of brutal torture inflicted on the body comes the disciplinary power, which intends not only to regulate the body but, with constant surveillance, to rectify the soul.

With its concerns mainly upon the individuals, the disciplinary power aims not to return blow for blow but to restrain and remodel every individual, as Foucault asserts

explicitly, ―the chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‗train‘, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more‖ (170).

The individual body ―which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces (136)‖ turns out to be the ―docile body,‖ a body which has been thoroughly

―ameliorated‖ under such an insidious coercion. Here, Foucault seems to suggest that the disciplinary power will always undertake its incessant and imperceptible task of transforming the individuals into docile bodies so that those disciplines may one day be imbedded, internalized, and even intensified by the individuals. In ―From the Repressive Hypothesis to Bio-Power,‖ Dreyfus and Rabinow account for the scheme of disciplinary power by claiming that its goal ―was to produce a human being who could be treated as a ‗docile body.‘ This docile body also had to be a productive body‖

(134-35). It is in this regard that Foucault relates the docile body to its utility as well as its productivity, indicating that the docile bodies will then cement the power which molds them, as they all become ―political puppets‖ and ―small-scale models of power‖

(Discipline and Punish 136). In other words, the individual serves not merely as

―objects‖ of the disciplinary power but also ―as instruments of its exercise‖ (170).

Accordingly, since the individual appears to be forged out of the disciplinary power, Foucault stoutly proclaims that ―discipline ‗makes‘ individuals‖ (170) in virtue of ―the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; not only on what they do, but on what they are, will be, may be‖

(18). Or to put in another way, it is the power that ―acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations‖ (16). Once the soul internalizes the disciplines, it will be able to discipline itself through and through. In this regard, Foucault reverses the traditional conceptualization of the relations between body and soul, proposing that the soul is the prison of the body‖ (30), for ―a ‗soul‘ inhabits him and brings him

to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body‖

(29). In a similar vein, Alan D. Schrift elucidates in his article ―Discipline and Punish‖

(2013): ―Where the body of the condemned had been the focus of the earlier approach to punishment, modern penalty is directed not primarily at the body but at the soul‖

(140). Here, Schrift echoes what Foucault claims about the relations between human bodies and their souls by reiterating that it is the human souls, rather than the human bodies any more, that the modern disciplinary power intends to intervene and inflict its punishment on. Once those disciplines have been implemented and internalized with success, the souls would indeed confine the human bodies from any future deviation.