Discipline and deterrence: Rethinking Foucault on the question of power in contemporary society

This article considers how Michel Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power might be reformulated and extended to account for significant transformations in the mechanisms of social control in contemporary, postmodern societies. Despite several interesting efforts to apply Foucault's conception of discipline to social control issues in the sociological and criminological literature, such efforts have for the most part misinterpreted his position. This article suggests a more adequate reading of Foucault's conception of discipline as a multipricity of minor coercive techniques which taken together constitute one of multiple schemes for exercising power under given historical social conditions. With regard to the multiple dimensions of power, I shall argue, noting recent criticisms of Foucault's work by Jean Baudrillard, that the exercise of power in contemporary or postmodern societies involves not only mechanisms of discipline, but of deterrence as well.