Individualization descending

Foucault, from Discipline and Punish : “The more on possesses power or privilege [in the premodern world], the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions. The ‘name’ and the genealogy that situate one within a kinship group, the performance of deeds that demonstrate superior strength and which are immortalized in literary accounts, the ceremonies that mark the power relations in their very ordering, the monuments or donations that bring survival after death, the ostentation and excess of expenditure, the multiple, intersecting links of suzereignty, all these are procedures of an ‘ascending’ individualization. In a disciplinary regime, on the other hand, individualization is ‘descending’: as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have the ‘norm’ as a reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference; by ‘gaps’ rather than by deeds.”