[ssf] some thoughts by Michel Foucault

[robin&amparo]

Typewritings of Old

 From Power and the Norm
by Michel Foucault

"We should distinguish four types of analysis concerning Power:
(Theoretical, localization of Power, Dependency, Knowledge).

(Let me jump to item3)

"3. If we grant the systems of powers this breadth, the same functioning 
of Power becomes visible at the most fundamental levels. Power can now 
no longer be understood as the guarantor of a mode of production; it is 
on the contrary constitutive of the mode of production, it functions at 
its very heart. We have seen that the work of the instruments of 
physical restraint  (factory, prisons, savings banks, asylums, etc.) did 
not protect a mode of production but actually constructed it. The prime 
aim of this restraint, in fact, was the subjection of time to the time 
of production. (1. Attunement of the individual to the rhythm of the 
productive machinery. 2. His subjection to the production cycle: crises, 
unemployment, etc. Savings here become the means of this subjection. 3. 
A system of debt and local control by which the workers are fixed at a 
given point in the apparatus of production until their labour power 
becomes profit-earning). Such a mechanism goes far beyond protection of 
a mode of production; it establishes it.

"The problem facing feudal society was to secure the extraction of rent 
through the exercise of sovereignty. The problem facing industrial 
society is to achieve the integration of individuals' time with 
production in the form of labour power. That is to say, the time the 
employer buys must not be `pure time but well and truly labour time. In 
other words it is a matter of constituting individuals' life time as 
labour power."

"If it is true that the economic structure based on the accumulation of 
capital is characterized by the transformation of labour power into a 
productive force, the Power structure which takes the form of physical 
restraint aims at transforming life-time into labour power. What the 
accumulation of capital is in economic terms, physical restraint is in 
terms of Power.

(Note that physical restraint includes mental coercion)

"It is false to say that the concrete existence of man is labour. For 
life and man's time are not by nature labour, but pleasure, 
interruptions, celebration, rest, needs, accidents, appetites, violence, 
thefts, etc. It is all this spasmodic, unpredictable and explosive 
energy that capital must transform into a continuous labour power 
continually offered on the market. Capital must make life into labour 
power, which implies Coercion: that of the system of restraint. The 
trick by which industrial society exercised this coercion was to 
resurrect the well-worn technique of locking up the poor."

(...)