D&P Selections

Initial Questions:

● There is a series of distinctions made between three different technologies of power in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: (1) sovereign force (2) social body (3) admin apparatus. Why is it that (3) has historically won out? [see pages 126-131].

● How does the “autonomy” mentioned in the context of administrative apparatus’ of power figure into the microphysics of power? [129].

● Should we aim to understand the extraction of force in terms of surplus within discipline techniques? [165].

● What is the purpose (or end) of mobilizing discipline within the context of schools? [215]

● What is the significance of signalization as relation? [166]

● It seems that a very systematized, organized form of power has centralized many modalities of power in contemporary society — does this mean that moral progress has become impossible within such a disciplinary context?

● What does ‘habit’ have to do with teaching and the imagination of education? [164-166]

● There seems to be a tension between the modern period’s “studied manipulation of the individual” and panopticism. [216]

 

Discussion:

—It is easy to misunderstand the whole book, Discipline and Punish, if one does not spend time interpreting the passage concluding page 131.

—How can we summarize the three different forms of discipline introduced by 131?

(1) Monarchical power, characterized by terror, torturing bodies, and vengeance

(2) A social power, represented by open juridical processes, and the process of coding individuals as juridical subjects.

(3) An administrative apparatus, characterized by immediate coercion, control over the body, secrecy of punishment (as opposed to the openness of [2]), and autonomy of the punisher.

—This third technology of power is the only technically true form of discipline. So… Why is the second form talked about at all?

—Is the answer in how we understand the change of the human sciences in relation to the change of the penal law?

—Does understanding (2) help us understand (3) as its foil?

—Sovereign power is not well-tuned towards solving the problem of illegalities. So, two technologies “crop-up” as successful in this endeavor. The social power method, and the administrative apparatus method. Both of these also have the benefit appearing more “humane” than the Sovereign method of torture.

—But these methods were never humane!

—There is a problem of representation of social bodies in these schemas, to where the individual person is no longer represented, but primarily macro-level populations