Dividuality

Abstract

Foucault was of the view that, besides there being a disciplinary mode of power that acted directly on the body, since the second half of the eighteenth century there was a new mode of power emerging that was applied to ‘man-as-species’. While he later reformulated this mode of power somewhat in his work on governmentality (2007; 2008), already we could see a recognition that various modes of power exist, and produce, as part of a wider assemblage, even if they might operate on, as Foucault termed it, different levels, scales, and have different ‘bearing area[s]’, as well as make use of very different instruments (2003, 242). In Chapter 1, I aimed to identify and delineate more specifically the mechanisms and instruments as they might exist and relate to each other when examining the mode of power that Deleuze saw as replacing discipline. To be sure, there are clear points of connection between Deleuze’s modulatory mode of power, and the mode of power that Foucault began to delineate in his work on biopower, and later governmentality. It is no coincidence, in that respect, that the tabulating machine, a digital device, was invented by Hollerith to compute data as part of the US census in 1890 (Strandh 1979). As indicated in Chapter 1, modes of power can function through the same writing apparatus. However, it is important to recognize that Foucault made his observations prior to the more widespread and everyday use of digital machines.