Mutations of power in capitalism. From the disciplinary body to the subject of entrepreneurship in Foucault's neoliberalism

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mutations of the concept of power in Michel Foucault's philosophy. To this end, two problems are taken as the core of analysis: the disciplinary body and the subject of entrepreneurship. On these two axes, it is examined, firstly, how, based on the genealogical analysis of closed spaces (such as workshops, prisons, barracks and hospitals), together with the administration of plague and leprosy, and the panoptic design of prisons, the disciplinary body is constituted. In this way, docile, useful and productive bodies are produced as effects of the power of disciplines. This distances Foucault from the concept of power in political science or legal theory, as a quality, attribute, or function. The article also specifies how the genealogical study of power raises the emergence of a disciplinary society that would be the basis for the development and take-off of capitalism. Based on the category of the technologies of power, secondly, the passage from the disciplinary body to the subject of entrepreneurship is proposed. In Foucault, we can find a whole typology of technologies of power: technologies of sovereignty, technologies of security, technologies of sex, technologies of the self. This concept of technology is key to understanding the passage from the disciplinary body to the subject of entrepreneurship in neoliberalism. Neoliberalism develops its technology of power, which Foucault calls technologies of environmental, whose objective is to produce a subject who internalizes the logic of the market, the calculation of costs and benefits, competition and returns; and whose social, daily and family relations operate under the form of the enterprises. Finally, some brief conclusions are presented, including the thesis of the author's sympathy for neoliberalism.