User:Emily/RW&RM/Trimester 01/06
The Means of Correct Training
Michel Foucault
The chief function of the discipline power is to 'train'; It 'trains' the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements. Individuals can be regards as not only objects but also instruments of its exercise. Comparing to rituals or apparatuses of sovereignty and state, it is modest and suspicious. But it is this power that invades the major forms through the use of simple instruments: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and the examination.
The exercise of discipline assumes a mechanism coerces by it hierarchical observation. This means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible. An obscure art of light and the visible using techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation secretly prepare a new knowledge of man.
These observatories organised as almost ideal model like military, and similar in school, hospital and prision and so on. All power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power. The model like mentioned above is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility. Thus discipline operates by a calculated gaze, not by force.
In nomalizing judgment, each subject find himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality and if necessary everthing everthing might serve as punishment. Discinplinary penlity is non-observance.Disciplinary punishments must enforce is of mixed nature: it is an ‘artificial’ order. Disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps.It must therefore be essentially corrective. Punishment is an element of a double system of gratification-punishment, and it operates in the process of training and correction. The distribution according to ranks or grade has a double role, it marks the gaps, and also punishes and rewards.
it exercised over them a constant pressure to conform to the same model. The art of punishing, it refers individual actions to a whole.
Examination combines the techniques of an obsercing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It estabishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. The examination introduced a whole mechanism that linked to a certain type of the formation of knowledge a certian form of the exercise of power.
The examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power. Disciplinary power is exercised through its invisibility, at the same time it iposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation. A system of intense registration and of documentary accumulation. In both sense of the word one must include the procedures of writing that made it possible to integrate individual data into cumulative system in such a way that they were not lost. So to arrange things that an individual could be located in the general register and that, conversely, each datum of the individual examination might affect overall calculations. The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a “case”. This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of theorization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection
the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge.
The more one processes power or privilege, the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions.
Societies of Control
Gille Deleuze