DISCIPLINARY TECHNOLOGIES AND THE SCHOOL IN THE EPOCH OF DIGITAL REASON: REVISITING DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH AFTER 40 YEARS

Abstract

IntroductionDiscipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, originally published in 1975, provided a genealogical analysis of prison as a model for disciplinary society, focusing on fundamental shift from sovereign disciplinary power. This new kind of that displaces liberal juridico-political theory of sovereignty also marks modernity in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is historically witnessed by demise of torture as a public spectacle and rise of a legal-scientific complex and its continuous effects as a distributed form of public power. exposed disciplinary as birth of humane sciences focused on greater humanity, reform and humanization of penalties that obscured workings of as a set of techniques for coercion of individuals operating directly on training of body. By appealing Bentham's panopticum also analyzed dominant institutions of prison, military, school, and factory in terms of disciplinary technologies that at once house, compartmentalize, distribute, normalize, and individualize bodies in creation of modern subjects. The carceral archipelago makes these penitentiary techniques central disciplinary society. In Society Must be Defended (and later works) given as a series of lectures in 1976 confirms his aim discuss theory of right in terms of a methodology that does not analyze as rule-governed and legitimate forms of with a single center but to understand by looking at it extremities (p. 27) where it operates in institutions as capillary where it transgresses rules of right and is embodied in techniques and exercised in networks - as a microphysics of power. Disciplinary was necessary correlate of industrial capitalism and cannot be justified in terms of juridical theory of sovereignty. Against Hobbes and Leviathan model of State he goes on develop his conception of biopower as power over life - from as body man as species - and correct his earlier overemphasis on disciplinary power.Gilles Deleuze (1992) comments: Foucault located disciplinary in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at outset of twentieth. They initiate organization of vast spaces of enclosure. He acknowledges Foucault's brilliant analysis of institutions of but also comments how recognizes that just as disciplinary succeeded of sovereignty, so too of control began replace disciplinary as all spaces of enclosure experienced a generalized crisis due cybernetic epistemology that developed in post-war period. Deleuze (1992), by reference William Burroughs, goes on name of control as emerging form of society replacing disciplinary where open rather than closed forms of enclosure support a free-floating logic of modulation based on dominance of computers that opens schools and other institutions directly market forces of global capitalism. I will argue that within societies of control, if we are adopt Deleuze's term, or what I prefer call the epoch of digital reason, education rather than prison becomes primary model institution of social control that breaks mold of spatial enclosure of classroom or lecture hall, adopt different forms of digital logic that turn classroom and lecture hall inside out. The spatial enclosure becomes spatialized in a different manner as loose, scaleable and connected networks that take on global proportion that in every way exceeds State and its territory. This process of digital logic opening up spaces of enclosure provides a very different institutional setting, much decentralized and autonomous within network but linked in such a way that constitutes a system for data harvest of all behavioral characteristics. …