Pastoral Power-- The Rise of Secular Salvation

As Michel Foucault begins his discussion with the relationship between rationalization and excessive power, he wanders away from an individual apparatus of power but moves on to talk about struggle. He describes a series of examples of opposition to traditional authority that he describes as transversal and puts them all into three categories: social, ethnic, and religious. He then goes on to discuss the root power form of this identity subjugation. Pastoral power, as he calls it, is the emphasis on forced conformity to one norm or another as a means of a sort of secular salvation. It is a distinctly different power model than the royal model in that it requires sacrifice of itself "for the life and salvation of the flock" (333). This new pastoral power sets state as a "modern matrix of individualization"(334). Its goal is to globalize and quantify the large population into a privilege of knowledge and then to analyse the individual by this "knowledge standard". What I think is somewhat ironic is that Foucault starts by speaking about rationalization and excessive power and then moves on to rationalize these new forms of power themselves. He sees them everywhere as there are numerous examples throughout his writing here and elsewhere. I see what he is describing but I also feel to some degree that identity needs to developed from somewhere and while he may describe the power of knowledge and its pastoral power application , I don't necessarily disagree with this power form.