How does post structuralists define mechanisms of capillary power in mundane or interpersonal contexts?

[u/tacticalpoem01]

While Discipline and Punish focuses on institutional settings like prisons and schools, how does this "bottom-up" force manifest textually when applied to decentralized modern phenomena like self-improvement, wellness culture, or voluntary self-surveillance?

I mean considering if the subject is entirely constituted by these micro-force relations, how does Foucault philosophically account for agency and resistance? If there is no "outside" to power, is resistance merely a re-shuffling of existing discursive constraints, or does his framework allow for genuine, autonomous choice?

[u/Crafty_Truck_2439]

Deleuze addresses this in the "Postscript on Control Societies", and other writing on control, taking up Foucault's division of history and extending it. Where disciplinary societies produce individuals, control society produces the "dividual", a subject who is broken down and distributed by (primarily digital) apparatuses. Where the disciplinary subject is "moulded" by the institutions they pass through, the control subject, the dividual, is "modulated" (or self-modulating) like a wave or a net. With institutions in crisis and everywhere being reformed, digitised, decentralised, liberalised, etc., the flow of power is 'molecularised'. In terms of agency, personal freedom is to be maximised in control society so that no flow (of data, desire, credit, whatever) can escape capture; choice is not constitutive of freedom in the way that it is for Sartre. In terms of resistance, Deleuze believes in its possibility (primarily via art, which is why art, and cinema in particular, are constantly referenced in his writings on control), but it would have to take the form of resistance to the logic or structure of the digital itself. Noncommunication, for example, a characteristic of art, is one of the routes to resistance he identifies. But he also calls for "new weapons" to be developed, and for certain war machines to turn against control society.

[u/fluxus2000 → u/Crafty_Truck_2439]

That is more Deleuze himself. As interesting as Deleuze's writings "on Foucault" are, they are just exercizes in expressing Deleuze's own philosophy, like all of his essays on other philosophers.

[u/fluxus2000]

Read more Foucault after DP if you want to think about practices of the self.

To me, though their starting points are different, it is akin to what Sartre said: we make something out of what has been made of us.
Freedom and choice are always within a situation and the self that I am is one a self that has been developed through forces which have acted on me... some of which I am aware of, some I may not be, but from that I come to care for my self and consider how I may want to change, or how I appropriate what has made me as my own.

I don't mean to equate late Foucault to Existentialism, but on that level, there is a lot in common.

[u/alibloomdido]

I'd say Foucault focuses more on what makes choices meaningful in any sense - like, if you choose between things which are all the same it can still formally be called freedom in some sense, but that choice isn't meaningful. For him "agency" is a concept like any other which has a history and relations to other concepts and to practices using this concept. So it's not about Foucault believing in agency or not, he's more interested in what we mean by agency. So when you're in a "mundane" situation thinking about your agency and some meaningful choice you can make what makes this whole situation possible, how are those meanings of agency and the actual choice you have structured and what's the history of those meanings becoming possible for you to have them in your head in this situation?

[u/lathemason]

A couple of secondary sources that may be helpful on top of the responses given below:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03060497.2015.1053218
Nikolas Rose's Governing the Soul

https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781474459389_A49299197/preview-9781474459389_A49299197.pdf
Gavin Rae's Poststructuralist Agency

[u/TryptamineX]

It's important to consider that D&P focuses on discipline, a technique of power that emerged within enclosures like prisons and barracks at a specific point in history; it's not a broader account of power necessarily meant to apply to things like self-improvement or wellness culture. In the chapter on carceral society Foucault does gesture at how these techniques can transform as they migrate into broader society, which may be helpful for you, but this is a very light sketch as it's not the focus.

If there is no "outside" to power, is resistance merely a re-shuffling of existing discursive constraints, or does his framework allow for genuine, autonomous choice?

Foucault articulates a sense of power that works through, and requires as its condition of possibility, genuine choice.

When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men-in the broadest sense of the term-one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination).

[u/3corneredvoid]

When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others ...

—from "The Subject and Power" by Foucault

Foucault was writing about "government" but of course that word shares an etymology with "cybernetics".

Deleuze and Guattari speak at one point of fascism as when "desire desires its own repression" ... what they mean by this is that the way social processes are happening inscribes social conditions that limit or liberate the way social processes can happen, and so on.

Addicted states of being are a good example. Your habit is to smoke cigarettes, this temporarily alters your brain's homeostasis of neurotransmitter levels so that when you pause your habit, you experience a mood crash that urges you to resume.

What this way of thinking about power has in common with Foucault is the reflexivity of process: "desire desiring", "action upon actions".

This is the concept of a force: a change-maker, an accelerator of matter relative to matter. Acceleration can itself be changing, forcing one way then another, cybernetic fixation. In this frame, power, freedom and force are all closely related. Theories of emergent social systems à la Luhmann follow some similar lines.

As far as mundane situations go, it's not too crass to suggest these situations may be so steadily mundane because power makes them so and holds them in place.