Foucault and Deleuze - Synopsis

Foucault, The Means of Correct Training (From Discipline and Punishment)

In this chapter Foucault analyses what he terms the transition from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies, which emerged and developed through the 17th and 18th centuries.

"The disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy" (which would be a juridical/sovereign power: select, levy and punish, according to the written law or the whim of the sovereign)

It trains and disciplines by a two-fold movement: -It homogenized and normalized the "useless multitude of bodies" -It separates the mass into a multitude of individual elements. It separates the homogenized mass into particular individuals each with its particular features. Yet the movement of individualization is closely related to the "norm" (and what is "normal") common to the homogeneous society.

"Discipline makes individuals."

Foucault describes the use of simple procedures or "instruments" of disciplinary powers, such as: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific to [the disciplinary power], the examination."

Hierarchical Observation:

Disciplinary power "coerces by means of observation." The gaze forms part of the overall functioning of power. Whereas in sovereign societies, the visibility of the monarch or sovereign was part of the ritual of display of power. the subjected masses remained in the dark, their gazes did not hold play a central role in the exercise of sovereign power. In disciplinary societies, however, "all power would be exercised solely through the act of observation." All individuals, regardless of their rank within the power hierarchy of the society, act on each other by a constant surveillance.

"The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly." (173)

This instrumental observation is manifest in several disciplinary places of power, such as the school and the factory:

"Surveillance becomes a decisive economic operator both as an integral part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power." (175)

Surveillance enables the disciplinary power to remain indiscreet (it is everywhere and always alert, present through the gaze of every individual and the network of their relations) and highly discreet ("it functions permanently and largely in silence")

This manner of instrumenting discipline, Foucault writes, "makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes."

Normalizing judgement

Every disciplinary system contains a "micro-penal" system within.

This micro-penal system differs from the juridical system (even though it may appropriate its rituals) in that it does not take an isolated case and refer it to the written law. Rather, the disciplinary micro-penality acts by making punishable the whole domain of the "non-conforming." That is, whatever does not conform to the disciplinary system. Thus the micro-penal system combines the urge to train (to educate, to make the subject conform to certain parameters) with the act of punishing.

Even thought the disciplinary power exercises a movement of normalization (and punishes whoever deviates from the norm), it separates its subjects according the their nature, potentialities, their level or their value. (see 181)

"The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes." (183)

The examination

"The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze."

According to Foucalut, the examination was developed as a technique during the 17th century, with important transformations to the power relations within several institutions. (Such as the hospital)

The examination established the principle of "compulsory visibility." (187)

Furthermore, the examination introduces the techniques of documentation and archiving on a grand scale. The power of documentation is here an essential part of the mechanisms of disciplinary power.

The instrument of examination coupled with it techniques of documentation establish two possibilities:

"The constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object."
"The constitution of a comparable system" for the measurement and description of phenomena and groups. (190)

Through the examination, the individual becomes an object for study (the object of analysis for a "scientific" apparatus, or branch of knowledge), and a node in which power is exercised (and thus manifested). In the double act of homogenization and indivualization that disciplinary power effect, we have:

"The individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality."
"The individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc."

Deleuze: Postscript on the Societies of Control

In this essay, Deleuze argues that the disciplinary societies, described by Foucault, have incresingly shifted toward what he terms societies of control. Since the start of the twentieth century, and in a process which accelerated after World War 2, "disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted."

In conceptualizing this shift, Deleuze warns that we should not ask for what is a better or worse type of society, as in both of them "liberating and enslaving forces confront one another." Rather, he urges us to look for new manners in which societies of control can be suverted, to "look for new weapons." In disciplinary societies, there were enclosed institutions, such as the family, the school, the factory, which have now entered into crisis.

On the other hand, the control mechanisms in a scoiety of control do not follow enclosures, but rather these machanisms are modulated across different areas, "like a self-deforming cast that will continiously change from one moment to the other." Deleuze proposes that the corporation has replaced the factory, and he analyses or sketches the outline of control societies by using the corporation as its paradigm.

A society of control acts on the modulating principle: "perpetual trining" replaces the school, where there is continuous control instead of gradual examination. In the societies of control "one is never finished with anything." Different institutions (school, army, work-place, etc), "coexist in one and the same modulation." Deleuze compares the modes of these societies to the legal strategies in Kafka's The Trial. Disiplinary societies would correspond to an apparent acquital, whereby the individual temporarily stops the case, but he could be arrested again and a new case start (in disciplinary societies, individuals move as in between incarcerations, from one enclosed institution to another). Societies of control act on the juridical mode of "limitles postponements". In Kafka's novel, this juridical strategy is termed "protraction," whereby the individual keeps the trial in motion while managing to deffer the final judgement as endlessly as possible.

This comment regarding "protraction" on societies of control has reverberations with Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of modernity and post modernity. Bauman uses the term "liquid modernity" to charaterze the societies where individuals are embeded in uncertainty, constant change, where life-politics and individual experience are in a constant state of fluidity.

Foucalt had noticed the double role of dicsiplinary power: it masses together (normalizes), at the same as it individualizes (molds the individuality of each member in the body mass).

Societies of control do not longer depend on the mass/individual pair. Control mechanisms reply on a numerical system, where each individual becomes a "dividual": a data signature, an identification sign which can be indexed in different data systems. The mass has become these proliferation of data systems: market, samples, data banks, etc.

Deleuze identifies the computer as the type of machine which better expresses the mode of the societies of control. The kind of societies is relevant to the contemporary development of capitalism, which is more a capitalism of servicesand stock trading, than a capitalism of the production of products. (Deleuze remarks that often production is delegated to the Third World, which would bring the question whether the Third World also operates according to the societies of control, and what would this mean.)