question archive What does this quote mean? by Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish "Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities
What does this quote mean? by Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish "Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities
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What does this quote mean? by Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish
"Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this; every system of power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this "economic" growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system."
