Mobile terms in the conceptual architecture of Michel Foucault's 'Productive Power'

Abstract

This thesis analyses the conceptual architecture in Michel Foucault’s work on Productive Power. I identify five mobile terms in Foucault’s work, which move between different power-knowledge configurations. The chosen mobile terms are ‘production’, ‘population’, ‘prediction’, ‘the subject’, and ‘the norm’. The conceptual content of each term changes between different power-knowledge configurations. Prototypical conceptualisations of the mobile terms can be extracted from Foucault’s work on Pastoral Power, indicating that Pastoral Power can be described as ‘proto-productive power’. Changes in the mobile terms in the move from Pastoral to Disciplinary Power indicate an emerging concern with the generation of productive subjects. Disciplinary Power can be considered the first system of ‘productive power proper’. Foucault’s archaeological work on the clinic serves as preparation for his genealogy of Biopower, which entails shifts in the mobile terms as the analysis of power-knowledge configurations turns from Discipline to Biopower. Foucault’s work on Biopower and Biopolitics, his integration of Discipline into the framework of Biopower, and the changes in the mobile terms accompanying the emergence of Biopower, are explored as the first changes in Foucault’s conceptual architecture within ‘productive power proper’. In a final step that conjoins Biopolitics and ‘Governmentality’, a more specific conceptualisation of ‘population’ comes into the picture. To account for the complexities of ‘Governmentality’ in Foucault’s analysis, this thesis concludes with a three-dimensional model of Governmentality consisting of a ‘general’ dimension referring to the ‘conduct of conduct’, a ‘specific’ dimension referring to governance focused on ‘population’, and a third dimension (in the form of Neoliberal Governmentality) ushering in new transformations in the mobile terms.