For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

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 gavebirth to the sciences of man was precisely the irruption, the presence, orthe insistence of these tactical problems posed by the need to distributethe forces of work in terms of the needs of the economy that was thendeveloping. Distributing men in terms of these needs no longer entailedtaxonomy, but a tactic, and the name of this tactic is "discipline." Thedisciplines are techniques for the distribution of bodies, individuals,time, and forces of work. It was these disciplines, with precisely thesetactics with the temporal vector they entail, which burst into Westernknowledge in the course of the eighteenth century, and which relegatedthe old taxonomies, the old models for the empirical sciences, to thefield of an outmoded and perhaps even entirely or partially abandonedknowledge. Tactics, and with it man, the problem of the body, theproblem of time, etcetera, replaced taxonomy. (p.73)

Keywords

Foucault, Postmodernism, Psychiatric Power, Power, Resistance, Labour, Wages, Medicine, Clinic, Psychiatrization

Themes

Psychiatric Power, Foucault Citations

Citation

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