the socially controlled unique individual
I acknowledge the (experienced) conflict between Foucault's ideas on covert social control of behaviour (disciplinary control) and the high value placed on individuality, in the society that I live in. This is the cultural context of my comments
I enjoy Foucault's ideas and find that there is a lot in them that rings true for me, in my life as I have experienced it over the last 50 or so years.
I am not so sure that disciplinary control ever was the only type of social control of behaviour operating, even in society as Foucault experienced it. I think sovereign control (overt) of individual behaviour was always there in some settings, and has more recently been making a big comeback.
However my comments today are about disciplinary control.
In order for disciplinary control to produce uniformity in the way individuals conform to the (declared or undeclared) social norms of the day, the individuals need to be subject to (more or less) the same cultural influences.
Up until the 50s in the western world generally, this may have been the case, and in New Zealand, where I live, up until the 60s, it definitely was the case, at least in the small town I lived in.
As I gaze out over the cultural landscape which surrounds me now I find it to be quite a different story. I see a huge number of different cultural influences at work. At times it looks like a patchwork quilt, where every patch is a revolving door.
The changes I noticed first were associated with the youth cultures of the 50s and 60s. These were (new) cultures which developed within a small defined section of the population. I'm thinking of the "bodgies" , the "teddy boys" and the "hippies".
To me these cultural changes were significant for several reasons. Firstly because they were manifest in only a small section of the population, making them different from previous cultural changes which were more whole population.
These changes thus acted as the icebreaker, driving wedges into the hugely solid culture of conformity.
Another significant aspect about these changes is that the cultural variation they generated, has persisted, sometimes within the same individuals throughout their lifespan, but also in a more general sense, in the cultural repertoire of society as a whole, in one form or another.
I know young people who have chosen to adopt the "hippie" social identity. "Bodgies" is a fancy dress party theme.
The solid face of the conforming society was thus fractured and cultural variations began accumulating in the cracks.
The next major sources of cultural variation as I see it came from migration combined with a growing sense of cultural awareness and sensitivity. People from different cultures, notably from the pacific, coming to New Zealand, not to assimilate, as may have been the case in the 50s, but to proudly maintain their difference.
And at the same time mainstream society in New Zealand was beginning to acknowledge (some of) the ways its culture was dominated by white, western, middle class, male values.
All these things began to open the way for our society to recognise the cultural variation within itself. The indigenous Maori culture experienced a revival. New Zealand "discovered" it had a significant chinese population, many of those families having arrived in New Zealand in the 1800s, about the same time as the big british migrations, but having been somewhat invisible in the society as a whole for over a hundred years. Homosexuality was decriminalised.
Add to this mix postmodernism (which I'm not going to unpack right now) and modern technology and the information superhighway, and its seems to me that one now (theoretically at least) has a huge potential repertoire of cultural influences.
The one solid 'conforming culture' has became a heaving ocean of cultural fragments, some quite large and firmly anchored in a distinct sub population, others less substantial, dissociated from their origins. (Variation without meaning? Variation for the sake of variation, is this the other face of conformity?)
Regardless of the nature of the social variation, (and also regardless of whether or not this process is happening within their conscious awareness) I believe people have a large number of cultural influences which can affect their behaviour, and the particular set of cultural influences at work at any one time is constantly changing for the individual.
Consequently it becomes impossible to predict how any particular cultural influence will become manifest in the behaviour of any one individual at any one time.
Therefore that individual is unique!
Its not that social control has disappeared, its just that it has become so complex that it is not able to be predicted. Is this an acceptable definition of unique?