Discipline and Power

The means of correct training network

The disciplinary power is not held or transferred but operates like a machine, with a pyramidal structure providing a 'head,' but the entire apparatus generates and distributes 'power,' placing individuals in a continuous field. Discipline is both indiscreet, being ever-present and alert, leaving no zone of shade, and discreet, functioning silently. Relational power is sustained by its own mechanism, substituting calculated gazes for public spectacle. Surveillance techniques enable the 'physics' of power to control the body through optics and mechanics, using spaces, lines, screens, beams, and degrees without resorting to excess force or violence. It appears less 'corporal' as it becomes more subtly 'physical'.

Normalizing Judgement

Disciplinary systems have a penal mechanism with its own laws, offences, and judgements, establishing an 'infra-penality'. They define and repress behaviors that escape broader punishment systems, enforcing rules related to time, activity, behavior, speech, body, and sexuality. Punishment involves subtle procedures, from physical corrections to deprivations and humiliations. The aim is to punish even the slightest deviations, making every element of the disciplinary apparatus a potential means of punishment, creating a punishable universality.

The means of correct training

Disciplinary punishment targets non-conformance, focusing on failures to meet required standards rather than just minor infractions. Regulations enforce both 'artificial' orders set by laws and 'natural' orders defined by observable processes like apprenticeship duration and aptitude levels. Punishment in a disciplinary regime involves both juridical and natural references.

Disciplinary punishment aims to reduce gaps and is primarily corrective. It includes punishments from the judicial model (fines, flogging, solitary confinement) and intensified training exercises. The goal is to correct defects and advance progress through repetition, making punishment isomorphic with obligation itself. The corrective effect is achieved through training mechanics rather than expiation or repentance. To punish is to exercise.

Discipline

Discipline operates on a gratification-punishment system. Rewards are emphasized over penalties, encouraging diligence through the desire for recognition. This system defines behavior based on opposed values of good and evil, distributing individuals between positive and negative poles. This allows for quantification and arithmetical economy, maintaining a penal accountancy for each individual that is brought up to date. School 'justice' extends this system, with privileges and impositions creating a micro-economy. This system transposes indulgences, calculating plus and minus points to hierarchize subjects in relation to each other, differentiating individuals based on their nature, potential, level, or value. Discipline assesses actions precisely, integrating penalty into the knowledge cycle of individuals.

The means of correct taining

Ranking serves a dual role, marking gaps and hierarchizing qualities while also punishing and rewarding. Discipline rewards through awards, enabling advancement, and punishes by reversing this process. Rank itself is a reward or punishment. Systems of classification, like those used at the Ecole Militaire with variations in uniform, associate punishments and privileges with ranks. Classifications are made at short intervals based on moral qualities and behavior. This penal distribution classifies and pressures individuals to conform to a single model.

The art of punishing in disciplinary power does not focus on expiation or repression, but refers individual actions to a comparative field, differentiates individuals based on a rule, measures and hierarchizes abilities, and enforces conformity. It also defines the limits of the abnormal. Perpetual penalty compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes, and normalizes. This contrasts with judicial penalty, which refers to laws and texts, specifies acts by general categories, operates on the binary opposition of permitted and forbidden, and divides by condemnation. Disciplinary mechanisms create a 'penalty of the norm,' distinct from traditional legal penalty.

The power of the Norm appears through the disciplines, joining other powers like Law, Word, Text, and Tradition to impose delimitations. The Normal is a principle of coercion established in standardized education, national medicine, and industrial standardization.

Discipline

Normalization, along with surveillance, is a significant instrument of power, replacing or supplementing status with degrees of normality, indicating membership but also classifying and hierarchizing. The power of normalization imposes homogeneity while individualizing by measuring gaps and rendering differences useful.

The examination combines hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement, creating a normalizing gaze that qualifies, classifies, and punishes. It establishes visibility, differentiating and judging individuals. Ritualized examination combines power and experiment, subjection and objectification. The technology of examination implements power relations, extracting and constituting knowledge, transforming it into political investment.

The organization of the hospital as an 'examining' apparatus was essential for medicine's epistemological 'thaw'. Regular visits transformed inspection into perpetual examination, shifting the internal hierarchy to favor physicians and creating the role of the 'nurse'. The hospital became a training ground and knowledge center. Similarly, schools became apparatuses of uninterrupted examination, replacing competition with perpetual comparison to measure and judge. Examinations transformed pupils into a field of knowledge, weaving power and knowledge transmission together. Examinations enabled the teacher, while transmitting his knowledge, to transform his pupils into a whole 6eld of knowledge.