Tina Bell
English 5870
21 April 2009
Commentary 7
I do not really understand what Michel Foucault is saying. Well, this is not exactly true. I think I understand a substantial portion of what he is saying, but I am not sure how this relates to our class. I will admit that I was desperately waiting for other students to post their commentaries. Contemplating others opinions might have helped me gleen a connection. But, to my dismay, it is 7:30 P.M. and no one has posted. Since this plan is not an option, I will attempt to explain what I think I know.
In part three of Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault describes the measures taken during the seventeenth century to control the plague. He definitely highlights the supervisory process. Everyone was watched, all movements were monitored, identities were registered and people were catalogued. I suppose since the plague is ultimate disorder, it gave rise to a strict method of supervision or discipline. “It called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, and organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power” (3). It was a way to control society and separate the dangerous or abnormal. When Foucault says that this power is centered around the abnormal individual, “to brand him and alter him” (3), it brought to my mind the remedial writer. I wondered if our attempts to brand and alter these writers is a connection to Foucault’s demonstration of these powers.
Foucault continues on to show how this supervision became incorporated into the Panopticion. The Panopticion was not only used for observation, but also as a laboratory. “It could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals” (5). Through the course of time Foucault believes that most (if not all) organizations including education have become a panopticion. Education could be considered a machine to experiment with varying methods of instruction. It definitely attempts to train individuals to the goal set forth by the institution. It, through it teaching methods, school and classroom organization, and disciplinary rules tries to alter behavior and change individuals. Throughout part three of Foucault’s work, I was unable to discern a tone. I am not clear as to whether he believes this is a positive or negative aspect. But, in the last line of this chapter, Foucault states that schools resemble prisons. I may be reading my own preconceptions into this line, but the word prison has a very negative connotation for me. Even as I see in my own mind connections between schools and prison, even though I believe the entire system of education needs an overhaul, I still find Foucault’s comparison frightening. I need to ponder this comparison more and anticipate hearing the views and interpretations of my colleagues.
I think that the schools are what prepare children for either social obedience, or an acceptance of their deserving to go to prison. In the US, 750 people per hundred thousand are incarcerated, not necessarily because they are bad people, but because they do not obey.
In comparison to those numbers, it is about 100 per 100,000 in Japan and maybe a hundred and sixty per hundred thousand in China. The English, French and Canadians all fall in the lower end of that range, America incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world , except maybe a few fringe regimes engaged in genocide. You can check that easily, yet we still have higher crime rates, particularly murder and rape, than any other developed nation. Why? I can’t tell you, you wouldn’t believe me. Check the numbers and think about it, and how it relates to value systems and ethnography, and ethnic groups, and power structures….and so on. Yes, it is frightening. Scares the hell out of me.
I have kids of my own as well as students.
Every time I read Foucault’s description and application of Bentham’s panoptic machine, I feel as if I’m transported to an eerie reality- eerie in that what Foucault has actually done is uncover through Bentham’s machines how societies work, and real in the sense that we have examples of the panoptic machine around us in daily lives. The gaze is everywhere, and today we see that gaze in the surveillance cameras that are becoming more and more prevalent, in the applications we voluntarily use so others can track our movements (yes, I mean Twitter), and the constant testing and examination we do of school children to ensure they have absorbed what we believe they should in order to become good citizens. Since societies consists of participants who occupy dual roles, that of watcher and watched, we act as the invisible guard in the tower while behaving as expected because anyone at anytime can be watching. We use examination, through testing, to mark and divide students in classrooms just as writing was used to ascribe labels to those who didn’t live up to society’s expectations or were different (mad vs. sane; ill vs. well; criminal vs. law abiding). All of this is done to maintain order in society; schools inculcate societal values to ensure its functioning and continued survival. Further, with technological innovations, the gaze is not only everywhere, it has increased in intensity.
But Tina, you ask a good question. I think that Foucault’s work and all work which help us uncover or perhaps question ideologies behind how one operates in the classroom create opportunities to transform the educational system. For example, through the lens of the panopticon, we may come to see that testing does nothing to help students, but rather simply ascribes them to categories that follow them through college (if they are even allowed to go while wearing such a label), and may even dictate the direction of the rest of their lives. And I also hope, in terms of internet privacy and surveillance programs, through such work as Foucault’s, we will become more suspicious of the gaze.
One more thing, in terms of schools likened to prisons, Henry Giroux (http://www.henryagiroux.com/) has done some work in this area especially on how the media has worked to criminalize, in some ways, high school students.
What she said.
From what I’ve read of Foucault, which is somewhat limited, he doesn’t have a tone. Instead, he analyzes the mechanisms of culture and social functions in a similar manner to that of a scientist: neither good nor bad, but simply as the way things are. In terms of schools resembling prisons, although you’re right to say that the word “prison” has a very negative connotation, the label is very apt in its own way. Both prisons and schools create a unique culture that people must adhere to in order to maintain the structure of the institution. In some ways, schools and prisons exist outside of society but function as a benefit to it. My school especially has a reputation for being strict (teachers from other schools in the district call it Cellblock Sierra). Although it might seem oppressive, we have very few disciplinary problems because we have such a rigid power structure system in place which ultimately creates a safe environment that facilitates learning.
Tone or not, I think a society/culture cowed by the threat of prison or isolation would perceive it as negative. While I think discipline and safety are important, we can’t lose perspective. The ‘rigid power structure’ at the school sounds downright Orwellian. From my personal experience with rigid rule sets, I submit that these students may not be disciplined but just plain sneaky. They are learning but not what the district would like. I bet they are just learning how not to get caught. I wonder how seriously students take a structure that has rules for just the sake of rules, and how this ‘opression’ affects creativity. When they do get jobs in the real world, will they be innovative or just run straight to the rules and polices handbook? Interesting.
again, what she said…with the addendum that Benjamin Franklin said that those who would trade their essential liberties for safety deserve neither liberty nor safety…I happen to agree with him, it is my all time favorite quote. Think about it.