Foucault on the Examination - Tracking an Idea

The table below is a preliminary attempt to track Foucault's discussions of technologies of examination across some of his writings from the 1970s.

 

Form Under Analysis	Period	Associated Mode of Power (Pouvoir)	Associated Mode of Knowldg (Savoir)	Subject (Target/Product)	Problem (to which form is a response)	Operation (what a mode of power does)	Techniques & Technologies
MF: Test
Test   (TPS, Ch. 11)	Antiquity (Greek Antiquity)
MF: Inquiry
Inquiry  (TPS, Ch. 11)	Late M.A. & Early Mod	Juridico-Sovereign	Inquisitorial (determines who, what, where)	?Soul?  ?	Locating Guilt	?
Inquiry (T&JF, xxx)
MF: Examination
Examination  (TPS, Ch. 11)	Nineteenth Century	Disciplinary [Power]	(? revisit)	Individual	Mgmt. + control of illegalism (196)	?	“Uninterrupted, graduated, and accumulated test” – “recording”
Examination (T&JF, IV)	Nineteenth Century	Disciplinary [Power] (52)   Panopticism (58)	Human Sciences	Individual (as Nrml or AbNml) -Behavior -Potential	Dangerousness (57)		·        Panopticon ·        Records   ·        Attachment (78) ·        Correction (67) ·        Recording (84) ·        Observation ·        Classification ·        Supervision (Surveillance)
Examination (DP, III.2, 184ff.)	Nineteenth century	Disciplinary Power (187)	Human Sciences (190) & Disciplinary Knowledge	Individual (170)  - as Body  - as Ab/normal  - as Case	Illegalities and Delinquency (257ff.) & ‘infra-penality (178)   Bringing practices and institutions (as well as creating them) into a disciplinary fold that does not require the expense and excess of sovereign power (cf. 126-131)	Normalization (177)   Objectification (187)   Training (“means of correct training”) … “the chief function of the disciplinary is to ‘train’” (170).   … explicitated as a “productive” mode of power/knowledge (194).	·        Documentation (189), inclusive of disciplinary writing, measure, notation, registration, files, accumulation of data, categorization, calculation ·        Accountancy (180) ·        Exercise/Corrective/Repetition (179)
Beyond (tbd)

 

D&P, "The Means of Correct Training"

 

We began with questions:

How is MF understanding the conception of individuality (184); specification/introduction of individuality (189)?

To whom does surveillance apply?  Does it always also apply to those to whom it applies?

How to articulate the imperatives MF is signaling in a spatial context.  How do we understand this through the lens of space?  Heterotopia? 

Is Bauhaus architecture a case through we can see the operation of discipline in a modernist context?

The language of ceremony (187, 189); the discussion of discipline’s rituals (185).  How related to compulsory objectification?

We could write the schema for the "examination".  See post above/below.

 

 

We moved to discussion:

In discussion of normalization, there is a discussion of the “imposition” of “homogeneity” (184).  At the same time the examination “introduces individuality” (189).

·         Normalization in contrast to judicial power (183).  Judicial power of the law is a law of permitting and forbidding.  Normalization is scaled, gradated, degreed.  Law is binary.

·         Normalization is a power of plotting along a statistical or graded or scaled curve.

It is an analysis of power, not a theory of power.  Analytical work of distinction and distinguishing.  It is a work of nuance.  A political anatomy of detail.  It is only through analytics of power that one can learn, can do inquiry.

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

1974 CdF Psychiatric Pwr, Ch. 9, pp. 201-223

Questions and points to discus:

1. When Foucault talks about how the idiot has no past, can we read this colonially? Linked to a question of education and assimilation

2. Notion of the will? Relation of idiot and will – its relation to Kantian morality? (p. 215)

3. Idea of psychiatric power as tautological? (p. 218-19)

Discussion: 

A kind of confrontation of wills between patient and doctor

- Discussion of Seguin:

- Will as ordering of instincts

- Kant identifies skepticism as anarchism and dogmatism as totalizing 

- A movement contrary to Kant – a will not to be organized/subsumed

- A will refusing to assemble itself as autonomous 

- Psychiatric power emerged because of children – to understand them, not children

- Madness for adults; idiocy for children

- The figures Foucault cites are interested in the movement from childhood to adulthood

- Difficulty of distinguishing between Foucault’s voice and the voice of those he cites 

- Draw out the power dynamic through a comparative of the psychiatrist and the teacher

- Surplus power (p. 216)

- The body as a site of power/surplus

- Relates to two weeks ago and the body and surplus of power “Punitive Society” 

- Extractive/creation of docility to manage surplus (to return in discussion of D&P)

- Not yet about education/what we would refer to as that; the problem that needs to be solved is how to make sure that parents could be freed from care work; we don’t get contrasts between different kinds of education

- Insititution of certain classes of children and the function of education as geared towards moral treatment (akin to the asylum)

- Prison/school/asylum as institutions of moral treatment 

- The goal is not to create autonomous people, it seems more to be securing yes to authority; development of obedience to external authority 

- Double movement between school and psychiatric power

- 218-219 relation of the school and the asylum 

- repetition of the phrase “supplement of power” 

- Moral treatment as norming 

- What accounts Foucault goes to (first-person accounts, reports, etc.) 

- The possible link between Foucault and Piaget and the question of development/assuming a paradigm in the process of normalization and psychoanalysis (topics at beginning and end of lecture) 

- Fear of what the “will to not will” represents