1. Discipline and Punish – part II
Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish – part II

2. Unit 3: Power as control
Unit 2: Dominating power has a “face” i.e. is identified with government, Sovereigns, decision makers, or dominant groups. If power has a face it can be resisted.
Controlling power is “anonymous”, invisible, and necessarily “everywhere”. It cannot be “located” in any single particular place. Foucault claims It manifests as “discipline” and other possible “modalities”.
This sort of power “controls” because it shapes our reality: “the human subject is a mere effect of power”. Yikes!

3. Discipline and punish: what’s going on???
Genealogy of the prison as a place and set of social practices. Turns out to be a Genealogy of “discipline” as a modality of power.
Counter narrative to the story of the “enlightenment,” i.e. the emergence of secular institutions in 18th century Europe/the age of “reason”.
Political Power changed during the enlightenment and became a force of control (creating a particular subjectivity) rather than simply dominating already formed subjects.
Strongly influenced by the work of Friederich Nietzsche (mid 19th century), Genealogy of morality (1887).

4. WHAT IS DISCIPLINE?
“Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for [Power’s] exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”. Discipline is a technology of power?

5. Discipline is a Technology?
1a :  the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area. b :  a capability given by the practical application of knowledge.
DISCIPLINE IS THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF KNOWLEDGE TO CONTROL THE BODY AND MAKE IT “DOCILE”? KNOWLEDGE BEGETS POWER BY SUBJUGATING OUR BODIES?
THINK ABOUT OTHER TECHNOLOGIES – HOW DO THEY FOCUS HUMAN ENERGY, DETERMINE BEHAVIOR, SHAPE OUR PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD?
IF DISCIPLINE IS A TECHNOLOGY BUT IS NOT DIRECTLY OBSERVABLE, HOW MIGHT WE KNOW IT REALLY EXISTS?

6. Observing discipline through its “techniques”
1. Hierarchical Observation ( ) 2. Normalizing Judgment ( ) 3. The Examination ( )

7. Hierarchical Observation
Knowledge and power are constitutive on one another. how does seeing lead to knowing lead to power? How does power lead to seeing lead to knowing?
Why does the exercise of discipline “presuppose a mechanism that coerces by means of observation” (170)?
“By means of surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system…organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power…” (176).

8. How might the lecture hall, or this classroom for example, create an architecture of hierarchical observation?

9. Normalizing Judgment
Normalizing our judgement and using judgement to normalize. Life necessarily involves moments of judgement – defining the terms of judgement is very powerful.
Normalize: to make conform to or reduce to a norm or standard.
Punishment intended to normalize our judgement; judgement is geared to punish those that are not normal and reward conformity. The standard of judgement is not good/bad, it is normal/abnormal (good/evil?).
“The power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure [our proximity to the normal ideal]. The norm introduces…all the shading of individual difference” (184).
“What is specific to the disciplinary penality is nonobservance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it. The whole indefinite domain of the nonconforming is punishable” (194).
“The order that the disciplinary punishments must enforce is of a mixed nature: it is an ‘artificial’ order, explicitly laid down by a law, a program, a set of regulations. But it is also an order defined by natural and observable processes: the duration of an apprenticeship, the time taken to perform an exercise, the level of aptitude refer to a regularity that is also a rule” (194-95).

10. Normalizing Judgment
1. Generates Field of Comparison: “Refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation, and the principle of a rule to be followed.” 2. Produces Minimal Standards: ”Differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected, or as an optimum toward which one must move.” 3. Hierarchicalizes: “Measures in quantitative terms and hierarchicalizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals.” 4. Limits via Conformity: ”Introduces through this ‘value-giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved.” 5. Produces Abnormality: ”Traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal.”

11. The Examination
”The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish. It establishes over the individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them” (184).

12. The Examination: “The ceremony of objectification”
1. Transforms the economy of visibility into the exercise of power (187). You are reduced to a thing that is tested. 2. Introduces individuality into the field of documentation (189). You are reduced to the documented outcome of that test. 3. All of its documentary techniques makes each individual a ”case” (193). You are no longer a unique person but rather a specimen of a particular type of person.

13. Group Work: written, choose note taker. 10 min
Group Work: written, choose note taker. 10 min! “We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification”. Identify a contemporary example of disciplinary power that incorporates hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. You cannot use higher education as an example. Briefly explain how these three ‘means of correct training’ work together in this example to produce a particular kind of docile subject.

14. Panopticism: conditions for correct training
Panoptics/panopticon = The ideal conditions for the “correct means of training”.
These conditions are value-laden and political, modeled on notions of “the normal”. “Normal” is never a neutral idea.
Prisons are “panopticons”.
Panopticism lays at the heart of the “disciplinary society” – thus the prison is the central institution of modernity.
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228).

15. Where is disciplinary power? P. 197, p. 296 What is the source of power? P. 27 What is the purpose of power? P Social effects? P. 218 What are its risks? How is it resisted?

16. Foucault vs Chomsky: Power as control vs Power as Domination