A Diarist’s Take | On Disciplinary Power
23rd August 1994 | HSC Days
@ MCC School, Chetpet, Chennai
This post seeks to elucidate a kutty little bit on how the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary power operates in the realm of academics – at the school level, - of which he [Foucault] seeks to elaborate in much detail in Part III of his book titled, Discipline and Punish.
Foucault prefers to call this panoptic surveillance in schools as ‘moral orthopedics’.
Well, one’s school and college life provide for the student the main ‘socialising mechanism’ – wherein the instructional pedagogies focus more on a system of ‘micro-disciplinarization’.
This micro-disciplinarization happens even through the seating in the classroom, the framing of timetables for the teacher and the students, the morning assembly, the roll call, etc., that help facilitate greater institutional control over them.
At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism, observes Foucault!
The school is one such disciplinary system which has a huge array of punishments meted out to ‘deviants’ who do not ‘follow’ the ‘norm’ and as Foucault puts it, ‘for even the slightest departures from correct behaviour’ in the institution!
As I’ve jotted down in my entry of 28 years ago,
When we were on our way to our classes at 7.30 am, we saw our Headmaster holding fort at the main entrance kinda doubling up as a ‘panopticon’ of sorts!
Then comes on the most gruesome part of ‘disciplining’ –
In the Physics class, Master made Ganesh and Sajjith to wipe the water that they had mistakenly spilt on the floor - by using their schoolbag!
When both of them were hesitant to use their lovely bags for wiping out the water, [and hence proceeded to do it quite reluctantly], Master came up to their place and proceeded to stamp their schoolbag with his foot, with such vehemence and ‘anger’ on him!
Speaks volumes to the grey areas that abound in the use of disciplinary power on pavapetta students – a power that manipulates the body to be rendered both useful and docile to society!
Useful & Docile – sounds oxy’moron’ic by all means, ain’t it?
To conclude,
Foucault, in his analysis of power, defines ‘discipline’ as ‘the power exercised through surveillance, control, discrimination, spatial regulation and classification’.
I guess then, there arises a strong need, an urgent need and a compelling need to ‘redefine’ the term ‘discipline’ to suit it to the present day context – and thereby rid the term of its pejorative label at a go!
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