Pre-Post Discipline and Punish

This reading by Michel Foucault hooked me from the beginning. The description of what occurred during the Plague was enthralling and gave off a suffocating tone. The model of the disciplinary mechanism was well explained- everything has a specific order of how it occurs and there is no room for mistakes. There is also a social order where the individuals in the town are at the bottom, the syndics maintain surveillance, the intendants observe their actions, and surveillance is then reported to the magistrates or mayor. These different levels of power are exercised in a chain of order to repress the civilians. This reminds me of Karl Marx in that there is a notion of a higher class and lower class and the upper class is the one with the ability to repress the latter and exert control through power. Life is determined not by the individual but by the person who succeeds him/her in the social ladder.

This notion of surveillance reminds me of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. In the book, government uses pervasive surveillance and mind control in order to manipulate and control society. Even those who try to escape this model of discipline and order cannot. Through this, ideology is maintained much like during the Plague. This also relates to Louis Althusser in that the Repressive State Apparatus in the novel would be the Government and in Foucault’s example, the magistrates or Mayor. All of these systems are structured in a way that is punitive. The civilians are passive while the magistrates are active and maintain hegemonic power through their dominant ideas.

Foucault also brings up how binary division is replaced by “multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power.” (96) Foucault goes past Althusser’s notion of binary oppositions and shows how it is even more evident that we see discrimination occurring through these harsh differences.