The dominant social regime has shifted from discipline to achievement, rendering Foucault obsolete.
Evidence
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault’s analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of “control society” do justice to this change. It still contains too much negativity. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 26
Categorization
- XREF: Directly engages Foucault’s disciplinary power from the reader’s stated purpose; also implicitly contrasts with Deleuze’s ‘control society’ concept. — connects to: Neoliberal governability extends beyond what Foucault imagined through maximum freedom — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 215
- DEFINE: Introduces and defines the core achievement society / achievement-subject concept that the whole book tests.
Related
- The Freudian unconscious is a historical product of disciplinary society, not a timeless formation. (similarity 0.81)
- Agamben’s negativity-based theory is anachronistic for achievement society. (similarity 0.79)
- The shift to achievement society serves the same productivity imperative that discipline served. (similarity 0.79)