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Date Posted: 22:44:35 02/02/02 Sat
Author: Grumpy�
Author Host/IP: 155-41.poccpe.cableone.net / 24.116.155.41
Subject: The applicability of this piece struck me as pertinent to our

present situation, almost as if the author had us in mind at the time of writing.

http://x.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/93_docs/COVALESK.HTM

"POWER GOES TO SCHOOL:
TEACHERS, STUDENTS, AND DISCIPLINE
John F. Covaleskie
Northern Michigan University

For at least two decades discipline has been at or near the top of the list of public concerns about our schools.1 Nor should this surprise us; developing the mix of foresight, judgement, and self-control that enables (or perhaps just constitutes) �discipline� is an important task of childhood. As long as schools are places where part of a child�s education takes place, helping children develop discipline will be one of the �problems� � that is, legitimate tasks � that schools face. However, when used in school-talk, �discipline� often is translated into terms of control and power, not development or education. �Discipline� is often, perhaps usually, synonymous with �classroom management.�

This sense of discipline-as-control will not seem strange to anyone who has read Michel Foucault, especially his Discipline and Punish.2 On his view, when we begin talking of �the problem of discipline,� we are really asking about the power relationships3 that exist within schools. Specifically, we should be asking what form of power4 we face, for power is multi-faceted. Foucault analyzes two forms of power in detail: sovereign and disciplinary. So let us examine each in turn.

FORMS OF POWER
As Foucault describes in the first part of Discipline and Punish, sovereign power is that form expressed in recognizable ways through particular and identifiable individuals. The �nodes� of this form of power are the king, the prince, and the agents thereof. These individuals are visible agents of power, known by others and by themselves to be such. Sovereign power is also typified by the intermittency with which it is exercised. It assesses taxes, enforces the law by exacting penalties for violations thereof, raises armies in time of war, and so on. But each of these cases where sovereign power flexes is discrete; it acts in response to a certain set of circumstances and through a specific and identifiable agent or set of agents. When sovereign power operates, we know that we have been acted upon, in what ways, and by whom. The complement to this is the understanding that most of one�s life is beyond the control of the sovereign.

It is more difficult to ascertain the precise nature of disciplinary power since one of its distinguishing features is the swiftness and lightness with which it acts, thus rendering it substantially less visible than sovereign power. Briefly, we can state three differences: (1) sovereign power operates through specific visible agents; disciplinary power is diffuse in its operation, coming from everywhere and acting on everyone; (2) because of its visibility, sovereign power is susceptible to resistance, while disciplinary power, invisible and all-pervasive, is difficult to locate, and therefore difficult to resist; and (3) while sovereign power affects only a small portion of an individual�s life, disciplinary power affects virtually all aspects of living, subjecting everyone to the possibility of surveillance at all times.

First of all, the disciplinary society controls not through the direct application of power by the sovereign or his agent, but through an impersonal and invisible gaze. The efficiency of disciplinary power is closely related to its invisibility compared with the visible sovereign. For disciplinary power to be effective, it is the subject, not the power, which must be seen. This relationship of visibility and invisibility is reciprocal; for the subject to be disciplined, it must be visible, at least potentially, to the disciplinary gaze, and know itself to be; at the same time, the gaze must actually be invisible so that it is effective even when it is not actually turned on an individual. Its totalizing power lies precisely in its universal potentiality, combined with the impossibility of verifiability.

The second advantage gained when the dominant form of power shifted from sovereign to disciplinary results from the key elements of its effectiveness: lightness, speed, and subtlety, which result in invisibility.5 This invisibility of disciplinary power makes resistance and/or revolt against it substantially less likely and more difficult than was the case with sovereign power. This is simply because there is no single or visible locus of disciplinary power against which to direct one�s resistance; disciplinary power is simply everywhere.6 In one sense, this might seem to make resistance easier � there are so many opportunities to resist. But power that is everywhere is in a very real sense nowhere, and, more to the point, becomes equivalent to a force of nature, which is the appearance disciplinary power assumes once it installs itself in the relations with which we negotiate the world.

We are shaped through the coercion of disciplinary power, but unaware of the shaping. This is the importance of its lightness and its speed; we are deprived of the opportunity for resistance, and once effectively shaped, we have no desire to revolt. To the extent that disciplinary power operates according to its potential, we can never verify that we have been disciplined, and we are always being disciplined. However, this level of efficiency is never realized; we live in a disciplinary society, not a disciplined one. Resistance is possible. The operation of disciplinary power is observable, once one knows what to look for.

However, even when the subjects become aware that they are being disciplined, there is no single clear target for resistance. In the days of sovereign power, the people could see the source of the power and the forces acting on them quite clearly: the king�s laws, the king�s justice, the king�s courts, and the king�s ministers. When the yoke fell on them too heavily, or with obvious injustice, the people knew where to direct their resentment and resistance. Contrast this set of circumstances with the operation of disciplinary power, which is not only more efficient in its operation but is virtually impervious to the sort of resistance which could be organized against the sovereign. Its invisibility and non-locatibility keep the people from perceiving its effects.

This brings us to a third advantage of disciplinary power over sovereign power: its constant operation. Power is only effective in when it acts; sovereign power only acts at particular moments. The opposite is true for disciplinary power; because it operates continually its effects are theoretically limitless. The control over the individual exercised by disciplinary power is thus not only more effective, it is also more totalizing, in the sense that it is more fine-grained in its effects.

Disciplinary power creates and informs the human sciences which do the work of defining our human �normality� by �play[ing] an important part in the creation of disciplined subjects, that is, individuals who conformed to certain standards of sanity, health, docility, competence, and so on.�7 But this sense of normality, it is critical to note, is not to be found in the �nature� of humans or in the social world, neither of which exists except as constituted by power relations.

�Normal� is nothing more � but it is also nothing less � than the social forms of life within the dominant discourses that power creates. But to have meaning, normalization requires something more than this: �normal� must be measured and defined in order to exert an influence on individuals. This is the role of the examination in the disciplinary society.8 The examination is the disciplinary technology that allows for a clear and precise measurement of those attributes which power deems important enough to order and manage. Further, the technique of examination allows reduction of data to a form that can be computed and averaged, and it is through this process that normality is defined and that the power of normalization is deployed. In this sense, we can see schools and their examinations to be paradigms of disciplinary institutions.9

And this process of normalization then serves the ordering function of power, as it helps create individuals of a certain type. Using the �normal� as a goal and an ideal, disciplinary power acts in the world to normalize those selves subject to it. This process of normalization defines for us the way we are supposed to be. And the invisibility and lightness of the operation of this form of power leads the subjects to confuse the �normal� with the �natural.� That is, the defined and desired �normality� is not seen as a product of power�s operation; it is seen as a �true� measurement of the way the world �is.�

Further, this ordering and normalization allows for individuals to be placed usefully within the social machine that the disciplines are used to create. Rather than constituting a confusion or a chaos, as the multiplicities of individuality potentially could do, the process of individualization with respect to a norm allows those individualities to be used and assigned in an efficient and effective manner in the service and production of an orderly disciplinary society.

The disciplinary society seeks, by its totalizing nature, to direct and control all aspects of the lives of all the subject-selves it constitutes. Only thus can all energy be devoted to productive pursuits; only thus can all subjects be properly constituted and supervised. It is a matter of efficiency: undisciplined expenditure of energy is not productive, and it is only through constant surveillance that such wastefulness can be prevented. �Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.�10

The purpose of discipline in the modern age, and this is a change from earlier ages, is efficiency obtained through ordering, identifying, controlling, and directing the multiplicities constitutive of modernity. The social direction and structure that used to be provided through the agency of a sovereign now depend on the efficiency of organization of the social matrices through and on which power will operate. Discipline is an organizational and productive force, �composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.� It acts in the world by bringing together (composing) the materials (including time and individuals) in such a way that the world is changed � productivity ensues. More radically, among the things that are produced are a certain type of productive time and a certain type of productive individual: �Instead of being locked away, hidden, the body was made visible and carefully scrutinized; instead of being tortured, it was programmed and exercised; instead of its simply being placed in servitude, its activities were reconstituted for efficiency and productivity.�11"

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Interesting -- Southern Gent, 08:40:56 02/04/02 Mon