Key Arguments

• Foucault cites a contemporary injunction to abandon the old belief that deep formations increased strength: "Let us begin by destroying the old prejudice, according to which one believed one was increasing the strength of a troop by increasing its depth. All the physical laws of movement become chimeras when one wishes to adapt them to tactics."
• In the pike-and-musket army, infantry functioned as a blunt mass or ‘projectile’—"a projectile, a wall or a fortress"—whose internal distribution was organized mainly by seniority and bravery (least experienced in the centre for weight and volume, the bravest at the angles and flanks).
• During the classical period, this gave way to a system of "delicate articulations" in which the military unit ("regiment, battalion, section and, later, ‘division’") became "a sort of machine with many parts, moving in relation to one another, in order to arrive at a configuration and to obtain a specific result."
• Economic reasons favoured this change: "to make each individual useful and the training, maintenance, and arming of troops profitable; to give to each soldier, a precious unit, maximum efficiency."
• These economic motives became decisive only with a technical innovation: "the invention of the rifle" which, being "more accurate, more rapid than the musket", "gave greater value to the soldier’s skill", allowed exploitation of firepower at an individual level, and simultaneously made each soldier a vulnerable target who therefore required "greater mobility".
• Because the rifle enabled and required individually targeted fire, the old "technique of masses" had to be replaced by "an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines."
• This led to the "need to find a whole calculated practice of individual and collective dispositions, movements of groups or isolated elements, changes of position, of movement from one disposition to another", that is, "to invent a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible segments whose basic unity was the mobile soldier with his rifle; and, no doubt, below the soldier himself, the minimal gestures, the elementary stages of actions, the fragments of spaces occupied or traversed."
• Foucault then parallels this with Marx’s analysis of cooperation: the problem of producing an effect greater than the sum of individual forces ("the special productive power of the combined working-day") appears both in industry and in tactics, underscoring that the new demand to "construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts" applies across domains.

Source Quotes

The composition of forces ‘Let us begin by destroying the old prejudice, according to which one believed one was increasing the strength of a troop by increasing its depth. All the physical laws of movement become chimeras when one wishes to adapt them to tactics.’9 From the end of the seventeenth century, the technical problem of infantry had been freed from the physical model of mass. In an army of pikes and muskets – slow, imprecise, practically incapable of selecting a target and taking aim – troops were used as a projectile, a wall or a fortress: ‘the formidable infantry of the army of Spain’; the distribution of soldiers in this mass was carried out above all according to their seniority and their bravery; at the centre, with the task of providing weight and volume, of giving density to the body, were the least experienced; in front, at the angles and on the flanks, were the bravest or reputedly most skilful soldiers.

All the physical laws of movement become chimeras when one wishes to adapt them to tactics.’9 From the end of the seventeenth century, the technical problem of infantry had been freed from the physical model of mass. In an army of pikes and muskets – slow, imprecise, practically incapable of selecting a target and taking aim – troops were used as a projectile, a wall or a fortress: ‘the formidable infantry of the army of Spain’; the distribution of soldiers in this mass was carried out above all according to their seniority and their bravery; at the centre, with the task of providing weight and volume, of giving density to the body, were the least experienced; in front, at the angles and on the flanks, were the bravest or reputedly most skilful soldiers. In the course of the classical period, one passed over to a whole set of delicate articulations.

In the course of the classical period, one passed over to a whole set of delicate articulations. The unit – regiment, battalion, section and, later, ‘division’10 – became a sort of machine with many parts, moving in relation to one another, in order to arrive at a configuration and to obtain a specific result. What were the reasons for this mutation?

What were the reasons for this mutation? Some were economic: to make each individual useful and the training, maintenance, and arming of troops profitable; to give to each soldier, a precious unit, maximum efficiency. But these economic reasons could become determinant only with a technical transformation: the invention of the rifle:11 more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier’s skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines.

Some were economic: to make each individual useful and the training, maintenance, and arming of troops profitable; to give to each soldier, a precious unit, maximum efficiency. But these economic reasons could become determinant only with a technical transformation: the invention of the rifle:11 more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier’s skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines. Hence the need to find a whole calculated practice of individual and collective dispositions, movements of groups or isolated elements, changes of position, of movement from one disposition to another; in short, the need to invent a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible segments whose basic unity was the mobile soldier with his rifle;12 and, no doubt, below the soldier himself, the minimal gestures, the elementary stages of actions, the fragments of spaces occupied or traversed.

But these economic reasons could become determinant only with a technical transformation: the invention of the rifle:11 more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier’s skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines. Hence the need to find a whole calculated practice of individual and collective dispositions, movements of groups or isolated elements, changes of position, of movement from one disposition to another; in short, the need to invent a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible segments whose basic unity was the mobile soldier with his rifle;12 and, no doubt, below the soldier himself, the minimal gestures, the elementary stages of actions, the fragments of spaces occupied or traversed. The same problems arose when it was a question of constituting a productive force whose effect had to be superior to the sum of elementary forces that composed it: ‘The combined working-day produces, relatively to an equal sum of working-days, a greater quantity of use-values, and, consequently, diminishes the labour-time necessary for the production of a given useful effect.

For example: ‘Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of infantry, is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation’ (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 308). Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.

Key Concepts

• ‘Let us begin by destroying the old prejudice, according to which one believed one was increasing the strength of a troop by increasing its depth. All the physical laws of movement become chimeras when one wishes to adapt them to tactics.’
• In an army of pikes and muskets – slow, imprecise, practically incapable of selecting a target and taking aim – troops were used as a projectile, a wall or a fortress
• The unit – regiment, battalion, section and, later, ‘division’10 – became a sort of machine with many parts, moving in relation to one another, in order to arrive at a configuration and to obtain a specific result.
• Some were economic: to make each individual useful and the training, maintenance, and arming of troops profitable; to give to each soldier, a precious unit, maximum efficiency.
• But these economic reasons could become determinant only with a technical transformation: the invention of the rifle:11 more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier’s skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines.
• it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines.
• Hence the need to find a whole calculated practice of individual and collective dispositions, movements of groups or isolated elements, changes of position, of movement from one disposition to another; in short, the need to invent a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible segments whose basic unity was the mobile soldier with his rifle;12 and, no doubt, below the soldier himself, the minimal gestures, the elementary stages of actions, the fragments of spaces occupied or traversed.
• Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed.

Context

Opening of 'The composition of forces', where Foucault traces the shift in early modern infantry organization from deep, massive formations to articulated, segmentary tactics in response to economic imperatives, the invention of the rifle, and the need to make each soldier’s force individually exploitable, linking this to Marx’s analysis of cooperative labour.