HULK WILL SMASH CAPITALISM!

And no, I'm not letting it go.

But Foucault also lived to witness the chaos of sprawl, which dissolves the rational clarity of “discipline society.” The robust outward view of the boulevards gives way to cul de sacs, parking lots, and highway-fed malls. And here “flow,” which had been stymied by Haussmann, returned, as a new kind of prison.

Foucault saw the fractured confusion of sprawl as an instrument of a new regime that he termed “bio power.” Bio power (very much like what Rem Koolhaas has called “Junkspace”) enlists us in an endless series of disconnected encounters, a sequence of pleasures, each eclipsed by the next. Bio power positions us as parasites, passing blindly through an intestine.

The sine qua non of bio power, Foucault says, is ceaseless flow. Within the constantly moving, amnesiac arrangements of “bio power,” the individual is no more free than before, but imprisoned in service to “growth, circulation, and trade, rather than glory, harmony, or hierarchical order.”

I learned most of this from two geographers, Henning Fuller and Nadine Marquardt. Their paper discussing these two very different regimes, "discipline society" and "bio power" is online at http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/glasze/Abstracts_Papers_Paris_2007/Fueller.pdf.