Egypt’s army conscription manifested a new disciplinary power over bodies

Evidence

What we are witnessing here is more than simply an attempt to maintain a healthy sanitary environment; this is the first manifestation of a new kind of power that exhibited itself on the body of the conscript, not in the spectacular way of his being beaten in front of his battalion, but in a more subtle, diffuse and cynical way. This is what Foucault calls “disciplinary power,” disciplinary not only because it attempts to manage the body (of the citizen and the conscript alike), but also in the sense that it created disciplines, discourses, that took the body of the individual to be its primary concern, e.g. medicine, psychology, criminology, etc. Out of the need to train the new conscripts and to subject them to the new techniques of discipline as will be shown below, the body of the conscript became the object, not only of manipulation, surveillance and control, but also of analysis and study. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 728

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Foucault’s disciplinary power concretely via the Egyptian conscript, showing spectacular punishment giving way to diffuse surveillance and study.
• XREF: Central to the Foucauldian disciplinary power thesis; parallels the modern-state surveillance material in this reader’s knowledge base.