Science of Individual

One aspect of the rise of "discipline" that Foucault traces is the development of what he calls the sciences of the individual. These are dependent upon the development of a network of techniques of gathering and recording information - "the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of comparative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms." Hospitals in particular were "laboratories for scriptuary and documentary methods. . . .

"The keeping of registers, their specification, the modes of transcription from one to the other, their circulation during visits, their comparison during regular meetings of doctors and administrators, the transmission of their data to centralizing bodies . . . , the accountancy of diseases, cures, deaths, at the level of a hospital, a town and even a nation as a whole formed an integral part of the process by which hospitals were subjected to the disciplinary regime."

The product of this was, first, "the consitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object, not in order to reduce him to 'specific' features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge." Second, this accmulation and organization of data made possible "the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of the overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given 'population.'"

As Focault observes, "These small techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting files, of arranging facts and tables that are so familiar to us now, were of decisive importance in the epistemological 'thaw' of the sciences of the individual." And they involved a decisive shift in the treatment of individuals: In earlier times, "to be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege." The disciplinary regime "lowered the threshold of describable indivudlaity and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination." A nobleman whose life was documented in detail left that documentation as "a monument for future memory," but the subject under disciplinary scrutiny left only "a document for possible use."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 01:50 PM

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