ABSTRACT

Having examined the broad theoretical underpinnings of Foucault’s texts we now turn to some of the detail of how the governance of people comes about. While Foucault focused primarily on the operation of power-knowledge in prisons, asylums and in relation to sexuality, these institutions are ‘successful’ within modern power-knowledge formations insofar as they ‘educate’ people to particular ‘regimes’ rather than subject them to coercion. A corollary is that institutions of education are also important sites of regulation in modern social formations:

The chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‘train’, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more… Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and instruments of its exercise.