The developments decisive for the transition from absolutist power to modern disciplinary society and thinking took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whereupon a form of power manifest itself in terms of constitutional law, sovereignty and legislative competency. At the same time, however, a radical reorganization of the entire society was emerging in which the nexus of power underwent a fundamental transformation. During this phase of reorganization society outgrew the narrow framework to which monarchical institutions had constricted it. New procedures and technics of power made their appearance “whose operation [was] not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control.”(170) We are dealing with a codification and rationalization that undoubtedly offered citizens a new degree of security, but power, thinking and thought were legislated. The individual was recognized as a juridical subject. These measures permited a refinement, a perfectionof the process of disciplining and legislation. Corresponding to codification was an increase in individualization and objectivization. The individual and thought becames the focal point of a classifying and objectifying mode of perception, which recruited the inquiring individual into a disciplinary framework populated with experiential facts. Thought and thinking are examined, judged and registered, so that their characteristics can be documented by a series of codes and their correlations. Through the multiple practices of surveillance and control, of classification and co-ordination, there emerges disciplined thought. For Foucault, in all areas of social life the classical age was the scene of an unprecedented concentration of discourses and identification mechanisms, all of which shared a single goal: the production of the transparent, and thus controllable, individual. As Foucault writes: “The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”(171) In contrast to premodern sovereignty, where the power of the Prince would “display itself in its murderous splendor,” modern disciplinary knowledge-power prefers “to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize.” It does not ostentatiously “draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects”; instead, it quietly “effects distributions around the norm.”(172)
Foucault's position is at a slight variance with Gramsci; for whom scientific theorization, in particular, serves to articulate and render coherent the power aspirations of specific classes.(173) It may, nonetheless, be argued that Foucault's analyses of the politics of truth or the relations of power- and knowledge–articulated discourse are substantially in accord with but subordinate to Gramsci's reformulation or reconstruction of Marxist analysis. Both thinkers were engaged in a theorization of the problem of hegemony. For Gramsci the unity of philosophy and history is provided by political action and bears the significant of unity of history and politics.(174) This means that the present should be conceived as history(175) and history “as present history, that is, politics.”(176) The equation philosophy=history=politics requires that philosophy/thought and thinking should also be identified with politics. It is in this sense that Foucault's analyses of relations of power and knowledge have been described as similar to Gramsci's observations on the relations central to the establishment of hegemony.(177) Moreover, the appropriation and attempted absorption of elements of Foucault’s work within a Gramscian problematic has not so much re-affirmed the continuing influence and topicality of Gramsci as it has effectively underlined the necessity of reconceptualizing a set of analytic issues at the very heart of Gramsci's work, notably those concerning the constitution of hegemony. In other words, Foucault’s work may be read as providing a distinct approach and a new set of concepts through which to develop an analysis and understanding of the exercise of power and the associated effects of disciplinary hegemony....