Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 107
survive, and some day shall get hold of Costaguana along with the rest
of the world’ (82). Yet the unconscious fantasy that he is engaged in
working out (as a consequence of his identification with his father) is
one of heroic individuality: ‘the secret of it was that to Charles
Gould’s mind these uncompromizing terms were agreeable. Like this
the mine preserved its identity, with which he had endowed it as a
boy; and it remained dependent on himself alone’ (82). It is entirely
in accord with Foucault’s account that Gould’s belief in his individual
autonomy is the product of his subjection to the disciplinary powers
of modernity, and serves those powers. For Foucault individuality as
conceived in modern society is ‘an effect and an object of discipline’,
so that our sense of ourselves as individuals is constituted through the
processes which constrain us: ‘The man described for us [by humanism],
whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a
subjection much more profound than himself’. 22 Both Gould and
Nostromo, in their different class and racial positions, are in this sense
subjected, and what they are subjected to is, primarily, productivity:
Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of
utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)
... It dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns
it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the
other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that
might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. 23
Bongie and Foucault concur in dating a new dispensation from the
late eighteenth century. For Bongie this is modernity, characterized by
a sense of the loss of ‘authentic experience’ following ‘the political
and technological revolutions of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries’ (EM, 9). For Foucault it is the new configuration of
power and knowledge which he terms discipline, involving the
human sciences and social institutions in a combined construction of
a relatively docile human subject. Both see this dispensation of the
last two centuries as involving a deceptive form of individuality.
Bongie traces the disappearance of a form of subjectivity ‘typical of
traditional communities’ (EM, 9) and pertaining to ‘the old subject of
experience’ who was supposedly ‘able to apprehend others concretely’
within a context where value was not called into question. This disappearance,
he argues, has generated in compensation ‘the modern
(Romantic) individual’. This modern subject, while ‘desirous of experience,
is nonetheless constituted by the impossibility of that