Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974

by Foucault, Michel (2008)

Key Passage

Okay, again very schematically, I think we could say that what gave birth to the sciences of man was precisely the irruption, the presence, or the insistence of these tactical problems posed by the need to distribute the forces of work in terms of the needs of the economy that was then developing. Distributing men in terms of these needs no longer entailed taxonomy, but a tactic, and the name of this tactic is "discipline." The disciplines are techniques for the distribution of bodies, individuals, time, and forces of work. It was these disciplines, with precisely these tactics with the temporal vector they entail, which burst into Western knowledge in the course of the eighteenth century, and which relegated the old taxonomies, the old models for the empirical sciences, to the field of an outmoded and perhaps even entirely or partially abandoned knowledge. Tactics, and with it man, the problem of the body, the problem of time, etcetera, replaced taxonomy. (p.73)

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