User:Ruben/RWRM/4 - Summaries Foucault and Deleuze

Foucault - The Means Of Correct Training

The disciplinary societies followed the sovereign societies. Disciplinary power attempts to decompose masses into smaller units, therein striving for maximum efficiency. It therefore regards individuals as both objects and "instruments of its exercise". The disciplinary power has three "instruments": hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement both of which are combined in the examination.

Hierarchical observation

Discipline depends on an apparatus in which "coerces by means of observation" and in which this coercion and those on whom it applies are clearly visible.

The ideal model is the military camp. In which the diagram of power is represented in the architecture: visible for anyone. Also the school building is an apparatus of observation.

"The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly." In reality, the disciplinary gaze needs relays. The pyramid fullfills two requirements: its complete enough for an uninterrupted network and yet "discreet enough [...] not to act as a brake or obstacle" to the activities performed.

This was also important in the factory: as machines became larger and more complex, supervision became necessary and more difficult as well, so that it became a special function.

Also in teaching several forms of surveillance were introduced, for both teachers and students.

By integrating the surveillance, "disciplinary power became an 'integrated' system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised." So hierarchized surveillance is not a separate thing, but part of the machine.

This makes "disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet [...] and absolutely 'discreet'": it is everywhere and always alert, but functions primarily in silence.

Normalizing Judgement

"At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism. It enjoys a kind of judicial privilege with its own laws, its specific offences its particular forms of judgement."

For example: each school has its own rules. There are 'micro-penalties' of time, activity, behaviour, speech, of the body, and of sexuality. The slightest "departures from correct behaviour" were subject to punishment. Even "the non-conforming is punishable": for example, one commits an offence whenever he does not reach the level required.

The order of disciplinary punishments is both 'artificial'/'juridico' (a set of regulations ie. the law) and "natural and observable" (ie. the duraction of an apprenticeship). Therefore, the punishments invole a double juridico-natural reference.

By referring individual actions to the whole, the function of punishments is primarily to reduce gaps between the individual and the norm. Disciplinary punishments are essentially corrective, therefore "disciplinary systems favour punishments that are excercise". It is repetation which goes along with the obligation itself (extra training, learning something by heart etc.)

In the disciplinary system, punishment is only one side of the coin. Gratification is the other. By making rewards more frequent than penalties, one is encouraged to work harder to make the norm. This requires behaviour to be measured between 'good' and 'bad'.

By quantifying individuals' rank between those extremes, they an gain privileges. Then "[r]ank in iself serves as a reward or punishement." And individuals get "a contstant pressure to conform to the same model": "the constraint of a conformity".

The disciplinary system compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes and excludes: it normalizes. "[T]he power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps".

Examination

"[T]he examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgement, assures the great disciplinary functions of distribution and classification, maximum extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation"

The highly ritualized examination combines the systems of hierarchical observation with the normalizing judgement. These systems allow to render the individual visible and to differentiate and judge it. The examination is a ceremony which objectifies those who are subjected.

For example in school, uninterrupted examination made it not only possible to measure and to judge, it also "guaranteed the movement of knowledge".

Disciplinary power is exercised through its invisibility (the observation) while it forces upon its subjects a compulsory visibility.

Discipline "had its own type of ceremony. It was not the triumph, but the review, the 'parade' an ostentatious form of the examination. In it the 'subjects' were presented as 'objects'." It was the visibility of that assured the "exercise of power even in its lowest manifestations".

It was also the examination that introduced a mass of documents that was meant to capture and fix the individual. "The procedures of examination were accompanied at the same time by a system of intense registration and of documentary accumulation." Disciplinary homogenization allowed the distinctive features of the individual to be captured in these documents. This turning of real lives into writing turned individuals into cases which could be described judged, measured and compared.

Simultaneously these extensive documentations allowed for "the construction of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena" across all (of groups of) individuals.

The ritualised disciplines "are a modality of power for which individual difference is relevant."