The traditional, ritual, violent forms of control have been replaced by discipline. Under disciplinary systems the body is seen as something that can be subjected, used, transformed and improved individually. It aims to make the individual body “more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely”(Focault, 182). Discipline is concerned with the infinitesimal details of the individuals’ lives. It emerged in order to address the inefficiencies that arose with the rise of industrial production and the subsequent accumulation of the population into large institutions. Discipline is a technology, a set of techniques for ordering human multiplicities. The aim of discipline is to increase the docility and utility of the elements of a system thereby increasing the efficiency of the entire mass phenomena.
Through hierarchical observation (via surveillance), normalizing judgment (via punishment) and examination the masses are individualized and categorized by degrees of normality. The process of normalization ensures homogeneity as well as individuality, which allows for the determination of difference. Examination is the ritual of power of discipline, serving as a mechanism of objectification. It provides documentation of the individual, thus formalizing the individual within power relation. It provides a framework in which the individual is analyzable, describable object and for which the document serves as a tool of control and domination.
In “Postscript on the Societies of Control” Deleuze reflects on the difference between Foucault’s Discipline and a new form of control, which he refers to as the societies of control. In societies of control controls are modulations, factories are replaced by corporations, schools by perpetual learning and examination by continuous control. Societies of control are societies in a higher order capitalism in which the operation of markets is the instrument of social control and individuals are pitted against one another in order to motivate.
How does Foucault’s analysis of the examination and Deleuze’s analysis of competition for the purpose of motivation relate to the systems of control in Concordia University? Compuational Arts? CART 255? Can you see either of these models of systems of control functioning in these environment?
What kinds of architectures (if any) will enforce societies of control?
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