Crowds and Party · 第 55 页

Already in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault treats the individual as an effect of power and knowledge as he details the making of the individual through the extension of disciplinary formulae of domination in eighteenth-century Europe.²⁷ Discipline involves a range of mutually reinforcing techniques employed to solve the problem collective people create for authority. The state needs the army, but an armed assembly of the people can overthrow the state. Capital needs labor, but the concentrated power of the workers can render useless, destroy, and effectively abolish capitalist investment in raw material and means of production. Over the course of the eighteenth century, processes of enclosing, partitioning, functionalizing, and ranking spread throughout the social to turn the motley, amorphous, unruly mass into a docile, useful, combination of forces. Vagabonds and paupers are confined.²⁸ Workers are closed off into factories. A monastic model becomes the ideal for secondary schools. The “army, that vagabond mass,” is regularized into a more regimented military, separated into barracks in order to prevent looting and violence.²⁹ The enclosed are then partitioned off from one another: “Each individual has his own place; and each place is individual. Avoid distribution in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyze confused, massive or transient pluralities.”³⁰

As Foucault makes clear, enclosure and segmentation accompany not only technological developments, the punctuation and measuring of time, and the correlation of bodies and gestures, but also important changes in the work of power on bodies. These changes in the mode of power’s operation on bodies increase opportunities to observe and gain knowledge of them and to put this knowledge to use in securing their combined utility and docility. “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals,” Foucault writes.³¹ “The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.”³² Observed and compared, bodies, aptitudes, and capacities are individuated as they are “classified in relation to one another.” Evaluated and rewarded, they shed their quality as mass and take shape as trained, specified, and knowable individuals.³³ As an effect of the enclosure of the crowd, individuation is fundamentally and deliberately—depoliticizing, the fantasies of liberals notwithstanding.³⁴ Put back in terms of a question Althusser poses in his discussion of ideological state apparatuses: “What do children learn at school?” They learn that they are individuals.

Silvia Federici deepens and extends Foucault’s account of the material production of the individual in modern Europe. Tracing the peasant uprisings, popular heresies, and witch hunts inseparable from the bloody processes of capital accumulation, Federici connects the disciplinary enclosure of the workforce with the “accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves.”³⁵ She attends to demographic and economic crises in the first decades of the seventeenth century (crises involving dramatic population declines in Europe and the New World and leading to the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade), situating there the emergence of reproduction and population growth as matters of intellectual and state concern.³⁶ A particular focus of the mercantilists, state preoccupation with population growth results in attempts to expropriate from women their reproductive labor, rendering them literally and physically a source of labor power as it differentiates between men’s and women’s work, devalues the work ofwomen, and demonizes their knowledge ofreproduction and the body. Moreover, as the ruling classes endeavor to impose ever stricter discipline on an unruly workforce, inefficient social activities like gaming and drinking come under heavy scrutiny and regulation; unproductive sexuality is forbidden.

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