Foucault and Discipline

Reading through Michele Foucault, I keep coming back to this idea of discipline. Perhaps it is because we just have our test last week and I have Louis Althusser on my mine, but I keep running through the idea of ideology and repressive and state apparatuses. Our entire lives are controlled by this idea of punishment, but Foucault notes early on “discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus” (100). In my mind, that eliminates the majority of options. There goes the government and military as well as police force and court system. However, then Foucault continues to say that “it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, [and] targets.”

In an attempt to unpack this commanding idea, I am thinking that perhaps it is not that the police, military, or courts do not relevance, but rather their ‘disciplinary’ techniques fall within a very particular and distinguished group. Punishment which I immediately associate with apparatuses is the ‘infliction of a penalty for an offence.” Seems simple enough and there is not much there to dispute with. Yet, ‘discipline’ which at first seems like a synonym is “the practice of training people to obey codes of behavior” and I truly believe that this is what Foucault is trying to get at. Perhaps it is just a difference in language, which our talk yesterday proved is significant, but perhaps it is something more. There is certain connotation to discipline when it is seen through a lens of taught codes of behavior. It is not just what keeps us down or gives strong authority to our live, but rather the codes in which we think and we act. It gives us direction and is one of those inescapable things in this world that we will forever be absorbed. I could be hitting in the dark here, but I do think the Foucault is trying to show us that discipline is a power trip that once learned, crosses into these repressive apparatuses. However, alone, it has the strength to stand just as strong.