Arantxa : Foucault and Deleuze

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The Means of Correct Training
Michel Foucault

Faucault describes how via the disciplinary training and surveillance of the 17th century, the 'Normal' was created. The Normal is meant as the comparison we all are being judged against. It becomes obvious at the end of the text that this judgment has no end, that when the 'Power of Writing' came into play we started to be documented within that judgment. With each new form of power there will be a new way of becoming judged and surveyed within The Normal. He uses the closed environments 'School' and 'Hospital' the most in this text as a form of examples.

Notes:
The training for discipline ‘makes’ the individuals; the individuals are regarded as objects and instruments. The training power is modest and gradual, with eventually a visible effect on the subject. Train fast, then levy and select. The training discipline began before the idea of mechanism. It used observation: ‘Observations’ with an overall functioning power of ‘The Gaze’, a diagram of special surveillance was applied. The disciplinary architecture is not only about being seen, but has to permit detailed screening and control, transform individuals.
School: Training discipline. Example: Long corridor with cells, every ten pupils with one officer. In the dining room was a raised platform on which the tables of the inspectors stood, in order for them to see their students. Architecture became focused on surveillance by means of small mechanisms. This would make it possible for a single gaze to see all. A center was created to which all the gazes would be turned.
The disciplinary gaze needed reformations to become what it would be. First there was the circle. But the pyramid was a little more successful, multiplying levels and having the entire surface supervised. What was needed was an intense continuous supervision, carried out not only by the master, but also by the clerks, supervisors and foremen. As production became more complex and the number of workers increased, supervision became more necessary and difficult. This meant there was special function with trained supervisors, different from the others.
Surveillance is decisive economic operator in the production machine and disciplinary factor. Details of surveillance were also integrated into the reorganization of teaching. Amongst the best students ‘supervisors’ were chosen for special tasks. Every special supervisor was also supervised. Later these proceedings were integrated into one mechanism: a mutual type. Because of surveillance – disciplinary power became an integrated system. Surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom. Supervisors forever supervised. Functioned like a piece of machinery.
It’s the whole that gives it power. And it is the power that seems all the less ‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical’. Within disciplinary systems are penal mechanisms at play, with their own law that consists within an already existing law. Punishment was used for all the slightest things so that a person was always being punished. From dismissal to detention, everything to make children feel the offense.
What is a different disciplinary punishment is non-observance. It works with levels and abilities (of the supervisors) It is important that disciplinary punishment is corrective, for example exercise, extra intensified and repeated. The disciplinary punishment is part of a double system. Rewards are more often given then penalties. The lazy individuals therefore get encouraged to get rewarded. Disciplinary penalty acts in a field of good and bad points. In this way it is possible to create an arithmetical economy within the disciplinary perspective. By assessing acts with precision, disciplinary judges individuals ‘in truth’. Disciplinary rewards and punishes. It gives ranks and takes ranks away. This distribution hierarches qualities skills and aptitudes.
The classes showed very different ways of punishment and rewards. To go to a lower class would be shameful and to get higher would be admired. It gave people pressure of trying to be like each other – act towards the same model. It originated in the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgment. Surveillance – as part of the disciplinary of the norm – was the beginning of The Normal, and one of the greatest powers at the end of the classical age. It individualizes because it can determine levels, reward and punish. It creates a gaze of normalization and in that consequence ‘judgment’.
Hospital: Medical action. At the end of 17th century the hospital became more of an examination apparatus then the poor house it used to have. Physicians not only checked their patients illness but also controlled their administration, more often then before. This resulted in regular observation that placed patients under constant examination. This also recreated to roles of ‘Physicians’ and the subordinate role of the ‘Nurses’. The hospital became a trained facility. The school also continued with the idea of ‘Under examination’. It wasn’t only the end of an apprenticeship that required examination, but was woven into a continuously ritual of power by means of constant examination in different subjects– the examination in the school was a constant exchange of knowledge.
Power is seen: the principle is the movement. Disciplinary power is invisible but the effect on people is visible – their visibility enables the power. With disciplinary power it is about the review not the triumph. In it the ‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by the Gaze, the way of looking at the subject in comparison with the Normal.
Because of the examination that surveillance brings individuals, they are engaged in more documents that capture and fix every individual. ‘The power of writing’. Registering people makes recognizing them (military) possible, and indicate the possible use that might be made out of them. These formalization examinations included: The physical code of signaling, the medical code of symptoms, the educational or military code of conduct or performance.

--?? Thanks to the whole apparatus of writing that accompanied it, the examination opened up two correlative possibilities: firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analyzable object, not in order to reduce him to ‘specific’ features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his individually features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of permanent corpus of knowledge, and, secondly, the constitution of a corporative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the grasp between individuals, their distribution in a given ‘population’. -- ???

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Societies of Control
Gille Deleuze

Deleuze goes onto the more modern times, and explains that the disciplinary times are being taking over by the controlled society, in this case it is more about production within factories and corporations versus the spirit of marketing, and how the corporations now want to influence social control. In this text it becomes clear again that the society of control has no end of reformation. New ways of surveying and controlling are constantly created. Adaption is vital in order to keep functioning within the society.

Notes:
Enclosed spaces are vast spaces. These environments have their own laws. In every enclosed environment we see a new general crisis. It is said to be reformations, but in fact it is already planned and finished. The societies of control are about to replace the disciplinary societies. Disciplines underwent a crisis, which are beneficial to the new forces of today.

According to Burrough: Control = new monster. In Faucaults words: Control = our new future.
In every disciplinary environment the liberating and enslaving forces are confronted with each other. It’s about looking for new weapons, not to think about hope or fear. Spaces of enclosed environments are independent variables, analogical. The control mechanisms are inseparable variations, a numerical system. Enclosures are molds, distinct. Controls are modulation, transforming.
The factory was about highest production, lowest wages. In the controlled society the corporation replaces the factory, and then becomes the spirit. The spirit gives modulation to the salary – with challenges. Individuals are a single body, with one surveying boss. The unions mobilize a mass resistance. The spirit/corporation uses this as a motivational force between de individuals.
In the disciplinary societies you start over and over. In the controlled society you are never finished. The controlled societies are metastable, which means they coexist in the same modulation. An universal system of deformation (changing form constantly).

The controlled Perpetual (forever) training replaces the disciplinary school.
The disciplinary society has the signature that designates the individual, and the numeration that indicates his or her position within the mass. The watchword. There was no incompatibility between these. Power individualizes and masses together, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body.
In societies of control what matters is the code. A password. The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it. We don’t deal with the mas/individual. Individuals are dividuals or masses.

Discipline money – minted money that locks gold in numeric standard. Control money – floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a currency.
A disciplined man discontinuous producing energy. A man of control is in continuous network. Machines give distinction between the two forms, the social forms capable of generating or using them are matched with a type of society.
Simple machines are for the old disciplinary societies. Later on they went on to energy machines, with a passive danger of entropy and sabotage. Now societies of control work with computers, with a passive danger of jamming and active danger of privacy and viruses. The 19th century is a capitalism of concentration, production and property. The capitalist is the owner of production, and by that progress is the owner of analog spaces. Markets are conquered by specialization, lowering production costs, colonization.
Nowadays, capitalism is not involved in production (production related to the third world now, even for the most complex forms). It is about high-order: buying the finished products or assemble the parts, buying the services and selling stocks. Capitalism is about product selling/marketing. The spirit/corporation has taken over the production. The analog places are deformable/transformable codes. The market conquers to grab control instead of disciplinary training and transformation of product instead of specialization in product. It wants to instrument social control. Control is short-term but continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, discontinues and infinite.
Prison: the attempts to find penalties of substitutions, for petty crimes and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay home. School: Continuous forms of control, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the ‘corporation/spirit’ at all levels. Hospital: The new medicine without doctor or patient – which substitutes for the individual or numerical body. Corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. The crisis of institutions: the progressive and dispersed installation of a new domination. Will they adapt, or resist against the societies of control?

The coil of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.

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