A note on Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ (1977)

Foucault argues that the origins of education cast a long shadow: ‘the schools and poorhouses extended the life and the regularity of the monastic communities to which they were often attached’ (p. 149). The organisation of school classrooms continues to militate against group work, and to insist on obedience and (frequently) silence. Furthermore, Foucault relates the organisation of time in educational institutions to wider economic and historical developments: ‘The gradual extension of the wage-earning class brought with it a more detailed partitioning of time’. Learning becomes compartmentalised; ‘it is a question of constituting a totally useful time’ (p.150).

Foucault also relates school learning to the guild apprenticeship: ‘the relation of dependence on the master that is both individual and total; the statutory duration of the training, which is concluded by a qualifying examination…; an overall exchange between the master who must give his knowledge and the apprentice who must offer his services, his assistance and often some payment’ (p. 156). Thinking of Higher Education, and in the aftermath of the Browne review, we can get rid of the adjective ‘often’ from the previous sentence. However, in an era of escalating fees for H.E. we are encouraged to think of the student as customer rather than apprentice, thus changing the power dynamic. The act of buying provides the buyer with consumer rights, but the historical residue of power and control remains, and thus there is tension between the higher education customer, and the institutions they attend. Furthermore, the fact that entry to H.E.I.s is dependent on grades attained, and that there are currently many more buyers than there are educational commodities to buy in H.E., restores some authority to the institutions. It will be an interesting dialectic if a new brand of student activism is catalysed not by political theory, but by customer dissatisfaction.

In a later chapter ‘The means of correct training,’ Foucault compares the school to a military camp, characterised by surveillance. Furthermore, Foucault’s description of the Ecole Militaire is similar to modern workplaces: ‘the very building of the Ecole was to be an apparatus for observation; the rooms were distributed along a corridor like a series of small cells; at regular intervals, an officer’s quarters were situated’ (pp. 172-73). Meanwhile, in modern offices, workers sit at terminals, in a room with one or more supervisors. Foucault goes on to assert the principle of surveillance in education: ‘A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it, and which increases its efficiency’ (p. 176).

Foucault was writing before the digital age. However, we can bring his descriptions to bear on the present: ‘thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the “physics” of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams and without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence’ (p. 177). Put ‘fibre’ in front of ‘optics’ and it works just fine. Furthermore, ‘the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at in any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so’ (p. 201). User agreements signed by students and employees empower managers to track net usage, and so the user needs to be ever-mindful of the fact that they may be being watched.

Foucault argues that surveillance and control are focused in assessment: ‘the examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement… That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized’ (p. 184). Again, the over-arching historical frame for the assertion is historical: ‘It became less and less a question of jousts in which pupils pitched their forces against one another and increasingly a perpetual comparison of each and all that made it possible both to measure and to judge’ (p. 186). Furthermore, ‘the examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’ (p. 189).

Workplaces and educational institutions tend to fetter; ‘one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique’ (p. 218). Furthermore, the controlling tendencies of organisations ensure the fermenting of rebellions; Foucault’s description of prison calls to mind the school experiences of many people: ‘the prison makes possible, even encourages, the organization of a milieu of delinquents, loyal to one another, hierarchized, ready to aid and abet any future criminal act’ (p. 267).

Reading Discipline and Punish gives a constant sense of conspiracy without a clear identification of the conspirators, other than a general sense that it’s the people in power. Perhaps there is something Anarchistic in Foucault’s analysis, in the sense that those who have power form and contort organisations to ensure they retain power. However, some arguments do come across clearly; that institutions (with their controlling tendencies) are an inefficient means of enabling learning, which should be fluid and lifelong. Furthermore, surveillance now has the potential to be more pervasive, yet less visible, than ever before. In addition, the emerging dialectic between the H.E.I. and the student/customer seems likely to generate conflict. Maybe Maoism will find its generational equivalent in Mallism.

Reference
Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan, London, Allen Lane.