the Female Body GOVERNING

Productive Bodies 137
Governmentality and the Affect of Contemporary Work
The process by which women in the United States entered the paid labor
force in post-World War II America exemplifi es Foucault’s (1990) notion
of biopower. The control of life through intensifi ed form of power and
politics is defi ned in two ways: fi rst, through the formation of “the body
as a machine” (p. 139) that is disciplined accordingly to produce certain
results; and second, the body is formed and understood as a biological
entity that can be organized through the control of life, death, health,
and “all the conditions that can cause these to vary” (p. 139). The fi rst
of these deals with the body at the level of capital (biopower) and the
second with the body at the level of the state (biopolitics). 5 Foucault’s
disciplinary society locates sites of discipline in various institutions
including the family, the school, the factory, the hospital, and the prison,
each with its own set of rules and organization of time, space, and
movement. Foucault recognizes that capitalism “would not have been
possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery
of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of populations to
economic processes” (p. 141). This is evident in the feminization of the
labor force in which the movement of the female population into wage
labor both produces, and is the result of, new forms of discipline that
correspond to this historical transformation.
Deleuze (1995) argues that with the increase of rapid technological
advances beginning after World War II, the world saw a shift in emphasis
from a society of discipline to a society of control. Deleuze articulates
the difference between discipline and control with the difference
between molds and modulations. In a disciplinary society the factory
disciplines the individual; in a control society, there is no mass mold,
but rather a process of continual “remolding” without a set or static
pattern. The difference is a change in quantity to quality and from
effect to affect. Discipline works on the body to effectuate a particular
model of being, while control works through the body by modulating
affectations. As Deleuze explains, “Disciplinary man produced energy
in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a
continuous range of different orbits” (p. 180). This alteration in the
primary formulation of work leads to a shift in the forms of self-governance.
The primary requirement of flexibility in the contemporary
workforce reflects how a system of control relies on affective relations
rather than explicit commands to organize behavior in both the social
and economic realm.
In Antonio Negri’s (1992) essay, “Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation
of the Class Situation Today,” he argues that transformations in