Midwest Populist Party » Decentralization of Polity amplifies the Political Influence of many Unique Walks of Life

…while Centralization expands the Hegemony of a Provincial Interest’s impact upon the Whole

This brief essay is a response to the Populist Party’s recent publication of a compelling argument calling for the decentralization of political power found at the following URI:

http://www.populistamerica.com/populist__32

The reason I feel compelled to annotate in a modest form the contents of the polemic is the opposition within social theory to conceptualizations of power in Modern society that conceive of it in opposition to the popular Foucauldian paradigm. Foucault, of course, argued that power was a dynamic that had become decentralized in nature, assuming a form that is often described as capillary.

As Foucault argues, the monarch has already been decapitated, and we need to reformulate our conceptualization of power in Modern society, accordingly, to reflect a networking of relations through which power is administered in local contexts through the disciplinary practices of institutions that lack a central nervous system.

Foucault further contends that this decentralized modality of power has a greater grip over the population - not in respect to its prohibitive measures upon agency - but in its productive capacities. Power is administered through the practices of disciplinarians - in the active implantation of behavioral dispositions into the bodies of their subjects. By this, Foucault is indicating that subjectivity is formed from industrialization of the individual body into a positive modality of agency where the subject has been trained to seek cultivate itself into the form that it has internalized; an effect of socialization that occurs through exposure to pedagogy, correction, disciplining, and regimentation; all of which are implemented through the expansion of the disciplinarian institutions that have come in Modern society to increasingly dominate all aspects of our existences.

In order to conceive of what Foucault is contending simply recalculate the extent of conformity demanded upon the Modern individual in developed societies as opposed to the lack of regulation upon the decisions of a savage. Quite clearly, through the positive production of our identities in the incredibly complex matrix of modalities of existence constituted by the proliferation of the distribution of labor in all spheres of society - i.e., the economy, the polity, and, most significantly, the spaces falling within civil society - we have become saturated within the operations of power - which extend their reach through grammar school teachers; through psychiatrists and psychologists; through the corrective mechanisms of the Juvenile Justice System; through the psychobabble of Dr. Phil and Opera; all of which qualify as the appendages of power, circulating not simply in the domain of what we typically consider to be polity, but in the crevasses of all aspects of Modern life.

I do not wish to construct a polemic in opposition to Foucault’s revolutionary reconceptualization of power; however, I do want to suggest that this description also involves the inculcation of a contrasting thematic quality, operating as an antimony to the interpretation of the decentralized nature of power in Modern society. It is through this expansion and rationalization of disciplinary control over the population that homogeneity is fostered, which can be indexed as a subsidiary to centralization, that, in this case, does not involve a monarch, but the proliferation and imposition of a form of life upon the populace; tantamount to the descent of an “Iron Cage” upon humanity - the hyperbolic organized and regimented form of life associated with Modernity. In fact, I would assert that this form of centralization is more insidious than suffering under the authority of the whimsicality of a despot, because it remains hidden, difficult to conceptualize. Furthermore, this is not at all at odds with a Foucauldian theory of power in Modernity.

It is, rather, a specification of Foucault’s work, which he arguably makes himself, that attributes to power in Modern society the effect of producing sameness from what is originally composted with diversity and difference. In order for the institutions in the Modern society to function, there must be adherence to protocol in order for there to be the predictability resulting in expectations of the behaviors of counterparts with whom we make transactions when operating under the auspices of the various organizations in which we assume capacities. It is for this reason that the Populist Party’s adamantly advocated stance on the decentralization of governmentality is not only in order to protect and expand our freedoms, it is additionally compatible with the trends in contemporary social theory. We call for decentralization in order for their to be space for social difference, which is a requisite for individual sovereignty and stylization.

Russell Cole

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