Annotations Of..

1.MICHEL FOUCAULT - THE MEANS OF CORRECT TRAINING, FROM DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

In these two chapters from Michel Foucault’s book ‘Discipline and Punish’, he writes about hierarchical observations as a ‘means of correct training’. He elaborates on the micro-physics and the technologies of a new disciplinary power. First used in the army and them applied to education, medicine, penology, architecture and every other branch in human life. The main functioning of disciplinary power is to train. The success depends on three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and examination.

Hierarchical observation, the exercise of discipline assumes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation. From the master observing the apprentice in correct technique to the harnessing of every object of human contact. Observatories were arranged like a military camp, schools, hospitals and prisons. These disciplinary institutions created a mechanism of control, an perfect one would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly.

Normalizing judgment is about privileges of authorities in laying down rules and the punishments for their infractions. These rules as we understand it today began as a power relation by people in authority creating a discipline on their subject. The authority created a power relation instead an description. This kind of punishing change the behavior of humans. It measures them and places them in a hierarchical system. The mark of your status is meaningful, you want to belong to a ‘normal’ group. Normalization makes people homogeneous, but it also makes it possible to measure differences between individuals. The power of normalization imposes homogeneity: but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render differences useful by fitting them one to another.

Examination is an technique of observing hierarchy/surveillance to qualify, classify and punish. It is an combination of the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. In all mechanisms of discipline the examination is highly ritualized. For example in schools, examination introduced certain new features like transforming the economy by the exercise of power. Also examination gives individuality into the field of documentation. And every individual becomes a ‘case’ that can be analysed and described, it creates individuals as an effect and object of power. The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society, but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that he called ‘discipline’. Power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of object and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. But how could they achieve these effects of such scope?

Panopticism meaning the ideology ‘all seeing’, was necessary in all our institutions to create a disciplined society. Foucault concern is the organization of power in terms of space, like the Panopticon. An architectural concept by Bentham in the 18th century. The idea of a Panopticon underlines the notion of the individualization of the masses, like hospitals, school or prisons. The concept of Foucault’s Panopticon and power relations creates an interesting opportunity for analysing the cultural landscapes. It describes the power in specific landscapes, and how power structures operate in a cultural landscape.

2. GILLE DELEUZE - POSTSCRIPT ON SOCIETIES OF CONTROL