Discipline and Punish, Part Three, the means of correct training, 2.1

Foucault, Michel.  (1995).  Discipline & Punish:  The birth of the prison.  [Trans. A. Sheridan, 1977.].  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

pp. 170-194, 2.  The means of correct training

Foucault begins this chapter with the explanation of strict discipline as correct training.  “The chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‘train’, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more” (p. 170).  The result of disciplinary power is “a multiplicity of individual elements” (p. 170).

[Discipline] is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.  It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.  (p. 170)

“The success of disciplinary power” depends upon the following three instruments:  hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination (p. 170).

Note:  Can we say, then, that training also implies disciplinary power?  In other words, can we turn this around such that training implies strict discipline?

Hierarchical observation

Coercion, Foucault explains, occurs by observation where “the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible” (p. 171).  This is accomplished in the military camp with the telescope and through geometry.  A military encampment is laid out carefully such that every soldier can be located based upon their rank and function in the military unit.  The space between tents is predetermined and regular throughout the camp depending upon rank.  “The camp is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility” (p. 171).  This method was applied to urban development as well:  “the spatial nesting of hierarchized surveillance” (p. 172) or embedding was practiced such that architecture was not simply to be seen but where the architectural style allowed for individuals to be seen.

Not surprisingly, the seventeenth century school building also became a “pedagogical machine” that mimicked the military camp through continuous surveillance.  Individual behavior was monitored according to the morals and expectations of the time.

Train vigorous bodies, the imperative of health; obtain competent officers, the imperative of qualification; create obedient soldiers, the imperative of politics; prevent debauchery and homosexuality, the imperative of morality.  (p. 172)

New questions arose.

How was one to subdivide the gaze in these observation machines?  How was one to establish a network of communications between them?  How was one so to arrange things that a homogeneous, continuous power would result from their calculated multiplicity?  (p. 173)

Since the perfect “disciplinary apparatus” would allow “a single gaze to see everything constantly”, the buildings were arranged in a circle which opened on the inside.  The center of the circle housed the administrative, policing, economic, and religious functions creating an “exact geometry” resulting in the eighteenth century mastery of circular architecture (p. 174).  In workshops and factories, however, continuous supervision was also carried out through clerks, supervisors, and foremen. “Surveillance thus becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power” (p. 175).

In elementary education similar strategies were employed.  The best pupils were utilized to keep track of supplies, to monitor other students’ progress and behavior, and to serve as tutors.  Only the tutors satisfy a pedagogical function; the other functions are purely for control and surveillance.  “The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery” (p. 177).

Discipline and Punish, Part Three, docile bodies, 1.5

Foucault, Michel.  (1995).  Discipline & Punish:  The birth of the prison.  [Trans. A. Sheridan, 1977.].  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

pp. 135-169, 1.  Docile bodies (continued)

The composition of forces

In the classical period (seventeenth century) a military unit became a machinery of individuals, explains Foucault (p. 162).  Infantry units organized themselves according to age and courage, where the weight of the unit was in the middle; the bravest were at the front; and the least experienced in the middle at the back.  The machine (unit) moved in parts; slowly, but deliberately.  This is the world of pikes and muskets.  With the invention of the rifle (early 18th century), however, things changed.  Foucault explains,

…it [the rifle] involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines. (p. 163)

Whereas the fighting unit had previously been a mass of men with pikes and muskets, the fighting unit became a mobile soldier with his rifle (p. 163).  Similarly, there were changes in the working day.

…the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive of social labour. (p. 163)

Marx compares the division of labour in a working day to the military tactic.

…so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when may hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 308).  (p. 164)

Therefore an efficient machine, according to Foucault (and borrowing from Marx), “maximized … the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it [is] composed” (p. 164).  Thus, composing forces and their demand can be expressed in the following three ways:

(1)  “The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others” (p. 164).  The body is reduced to a function; bravery and strength no longer matter, but where the body is placed.  The body becomes “part of a multi-segmentary machine” (p. 164).

(2)  “The various chronological series that discipline must combine to form a composite time are also piece of machinery” (p. 164).  Each part must work together to minimize time and maximize the effect.  It is pretty easy to see the analogy to military tactics.  But Foucault also applies this same analogy to education.  Foucault introduced the Lancaster method which extended from the 17th to the early 19th century.  Today we might call the Lancaster method “peer tutoring” where each student is either learning or teaching another student.

(3)  “This carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command” (p. 166).  The command became the bell.  Different ringings of the bell indicated different commands:  one bell for ending an exercise, two bells to repeat the exercise and so forth.  Students were mechanically habituated to the sound(s) of the bell which reinforced their docility to the signal.

The training of schoolchildren was to be carried out in the same way:  few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted only by signals — bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher, or that little wooden apparatus used by the Brothers of the Christian Schools; it was called par excellence the ‘Signal’ and it contained in its mechanical brevity both the technique of command and the morality of obedience.  (p. 166)

Students were expected to learn the signals and to react immediately to them.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

Foucault claims that “discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality” (p. 167):  cellular (spatial distribution), organic (coding of activities), genetic (time), and combinatory (composition of forces); using four techniques:  drawing up tables, prescribing movements, imposing exercises, and arranging tactics (p. 167).

Tactics, the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the produce of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice. (p. 167)

Once we understands tactics and the foundation of the science of war, then Foucault takes us a little further.

Politics, as a technique of internal peace and order, sought to implement the mechanism of the perfect army, of the disciplined mass, of the docile, useful troop, of the regiment in camp and in the field, on manoeuvres and on exercises.  (p. 168)

Foucault continues, “if there is a politics-war series that passes through strategy, there is an army-politics series that passes through tactics” (p. 168).  Foucault summarizes the classical age (17th & 18th century) which paves the way for the Napoleonic regime, much of which remains today.

Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.  (p. 169)

Discipline and Punish, Part Three, docile bodies, 1.4

Foucault, Michel.  (1995).  Discipline & Punish:  The birth of the prison.  [Trans. A. Sheridan, 1977.].  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

pp. 135-169, 1.  Docile bodies (continued)

The organization of geneses

Foucault begins this section with the Gobelins, a combination factory and school in the 17th and 18th century.  The 1667 edict which encouraged such institutions results in guild apprenticeships where children on “scholarship” are systematically “trained” and certified through examinations.  The master/apprenticeship relationship confers knowledge and results in domestic service.  Foucault further explains that in 1737 another school was organized for the Gobelins’ apprentices; a school of drawing.  Within this school the methods of instruction, examination, and record-keeping were further refined.  The Gobelins was one example “in the classical period … for taking charge of the time of individual existences” (p. 157).  Time was capitalized upon through training, examination, differentiated pedagogy, and physical work.

The disciplines, which analyse space, break up and rearrange activities, must also be understood as machinery for adding up and capitalizing time.  (p. 157)

Four methods of dividing time emerge:  (1)  “divide duration into successive or parallel segments, each of which must end at a specific time” (p. 157); (2) “organize these threads [of time] according to an analytical plan–succession of elements” (p. 158); (3) “finalize these temporal segments” (p. 158); and (4) “draw up series of series” (p. 158).  In dividing time into segments, instruction, for instance, is not mixed with practice; every time period has a beginning time and an ending time.  In this practice individuals are habituated toward their use of time from an early age, whether in the manufactory or the military unit.  Organization of time resulted in repetitive instruction where each segment of time increased the difficulty of the instruction, practice, or exercise.  Finalizing each segment of time was the examination.  Each segment lasted for a specified period time that ended with a test to see how each student performed.  Records of each student’s behavior and examinations were meticulously kept so that students could be moved to the next level or kept back.  The military academy sought to

lay down for each individual, according to his level, his seniority, his rank, the exercises that are suited to him; common exercises have a differing role and each difference involves specific exercises.  (p. 158-159)

It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice–specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult time, from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations; drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a particular stage and which involves exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying individuals according to the way in which they progress through these series.  (p. 159)

In the eighteenth century disciplinary time was formalized into levels; seven to be exact.  Each level represented a very specific kind of learning and which had to be examined and certified before moving onto the next level of learning.  “The ‘seriation’ of successive activities makes possible a whole investment of duration by power … (differentiation, correction, punishment, elimination)” (p. 160).  Another way of describing what Foucault terms “an evolution of time” is “the new techniques of power” “administer time and make it useful” “by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization” (p. 160).    Within this technology of power lies the genesis of the individual or geneses of individuals.

One final aspect of the notion of disciplinary time as a technology of power is the exercise.  In monastic settings the exercise was the path by which the community gained salvation.  Exercises were experienced in groups at specific times of day.  Increasing complexity was a characteristic of the monastic exercises as well.  However, Foucault concludes that

Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends towards a subjection that has never reached its limit.  (p. 162)