ABSTRACT
The dual-sided relations of production mesh with the dual-sided disciplinary practices: they simultaneously empower and repress, organize and dissolve, create and alienate, produce wealth and produce poverty. This synthesis between Marx’s law of motion and Foucault’s logic of power is not merely conceptual. That ‘relations of production’ and ‘disciplinary power’ dovetail suggests to me that they model dimensions (structure and agency) of a common real object: capital, the cellular form of power, containing the genetic code of the body politic (Marx 1867b:90). In this chapter, I want to reflect on the implications of this argument for the belief that Marx and Foucault are fundamentally incompatible, to develop a realist reading of Foucault, and to suggest how my line of argument might be developed.
