Disciplinary power produces individuality rather than merely restricting it from outside

Evidence

The chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‘train’, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them. Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units. It ‘trains’ the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements – small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 264 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 301 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

When the feelings seize on exchange value it is no mystical transubstantiation. It corresponds to the behaviour of the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love. The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of connecting this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretence of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual. Even in the realm of the superstructure, the appearance is not merely the concealment of the essence, but proceeds of necessity from the essence itself. The identical character of the goods which everyone must buy hides itself behind the rigour of the universally compulsory style. The fiction of the relation between supply and demand survives in the fictitiously individual nuances. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 82 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Individuality is simultaneously a residue escaping the system and a wound the system inflicts; Emancipation from society weakens rather than empowers the individual — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 169; Unchecked individualism destroys individuality rather than protecting it — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 169 (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Disciplinary power produces individuals rather than suppressing them. #corroborates (0.98) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 264
• Power produces the individual rather than merely repressing it #corroborates (0.97) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 301
• Standardized production forces a compensating pretence of individualism #complicates (0.74) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 82