ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Michel Foucault in order to make sense of discipline that he began to understand but at the same time has evolved very rapidly over time. He proposes a fragmented and relational concept of power that allows us to examine a non-sovereign-centred potential for disciplining subjects. The chapter explores this slow but profound transition from sovereign power to neoliberal governmentality, which is based on high levels of disciplinary normalisation upon life. He argues that discipline works through situated contingencies where individualised bodies are ranked and assayed according to a political anatomy of detail. Furthermore, his argument suggests that the biopolitics of fear is central to the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism. Neoliberalism entails spreading the free market to all aspects of society as the basis for the production of new forms of life: it extends the process of making the free market a general matrix of social and political relations by taking as its focus not exchange but competition.
