Discipline, Politics, and Ambiguity

Abstract

Is there a sense of which liberal and radical thought together obscure modes of control in modernity? A sense, that is, in which the conceptions of self held by radical proponents of civic virtue and liberal defenders of human interests and rights combine to conceal the violence required to produce and maintain the modern self? Michel Foucault thinks there is. He treats liberalism and radicalism as two complementary doctrines; together they enter into those discursive practices which constitute disciplinary society. I will explore this question, first, by offering a brief account of contemporary modes of control, which, though surely contestable, coheres with a conception of self common to liberals and radicals; second, by presenting the Foucauldian case for extension of the account into new corners of institutional life; and third, by responding to the Foucauldian reading with one that both profits and deviates from it. The dialectic to be pursued expresses the conviction that liberal and radical doctrines are most in need of redefinition at those obscure junctures where their differences merge into commonalities.