• The Meta-Disciplinary: Capital at the Threshold of Control

    Author(s):
    John Welsh (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Subject(s):
    Biopolitics, Capitalism, History, Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984, Political science, Sociology
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    capitalist governmentality, Discipline and Punish, Foucault, societies of control, History of capitalism, Michel Foucault, Political theory, Social power, Social theory
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cy13-7175
    Abstract:
    Discipline and Punish has been the seminal text for students of the rationality of disciplinary power. In recent years, critical scholarship has become increasingly keen to move analytically beyond the normative mode of disciplinary power. As such, D&P is increasingly marginalized as a text, in favour of Foucault’s later works. In this discursive context, this paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, I want to think through the transformations in labour control over the last 30 years of neoliberal counterrevolution in terms of the movement beyond disciplinary power. Secondly, I shall critique the autonomous and normative governmentality concept by the reinsertion of the ‘genealogy of capital’ in terms of the ontology of axiomatic capitalism. I shall address the undertreated genealogical movement from disciplinarity to governmentality, by arguing for something provisionally tagged meta-disciplinarity. The worth of such a move is to challenge the critical potency of the governmentality concept as is, in the belief that the ‘meta-disciplinary’ offers the most promising and relevant ligature from Foucault’s work into Marxist scholarship on the transformations of neoliberal capitalism and the technologies of its megamachine that confronts us 40 years on.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1177/0896920516628308
    Publisher:
    SAGE Publications
    Pub. Date:
    2016-3-1
    Journal:
    Critical Sociology
    Volume:
    44
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    29 - 44
    ISSN:
    0896-9205,1569-1632
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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