Katt Blackwell-Starnes's List: Foucault

• Abstract In this essay, Tyson Lewis theorizes current lockdown practices, zero-tolerance policies, and No Child Left Behind initiatives in U.S. schooling by drawing on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the concentration camp and the state of exception. Agamben’s theory of the camp provides a challenging, critical vantage point for looking at the ambiguities that emerge from the complex field of disciplinary procedures now prevalent in inner-city, low-income, minority schools, and helps to clarify what exactly is at stake in the symbolic and sometimes physical violence of schooling. Key to understanding the primary relation between camp and classroom is Agamben’s framework of the biopolitical, which paradoxically includes life as a political concern through its exclusion from the political sphere. Here Lewis appropriates Agamben’s terminology in order to theorize the biopedagogical, wherein educational life is included in schooling through its abandonment. For Lewis, the theory of the camp is necessary to recognizing how schools function and, in turn, how they could function differently.

• This article illustrates how educational reforms subordinate elementary school teachers and reduce their opportunities for  professionalism. Reflecting Foucault's image and discussion of the panopticon, educational administration and the public participate  in monitoring teachers' practices, leaving teachers in an untenable position for professional autonomy and therefore opportunities  to become professionals. In addition, teachers themselves are complicit in their own subordination and are left with limited  opportunities for resistance. Qualitative data of new and veteran New York City schoolteachers provide the basis for the study;  the current climate of accountability provides the backdrop for the discussion.

• Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free.  By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized.  Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains.  (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint) (“The Subject and Power,” 790).
• Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay.  In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination (“The Subject and Power,” 790).

• "A fear haunted the latter half of the eighteenth century: the fear of darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths.... If Bentham's project aroused interest, this was because it provided a formula applicable to many domains, the formula of 'power through transparency', subjection by 'illumination'" (1980:153,154).
• "Power is not discipline; discipline is a possible procedure of power" (1984:380)
• Power is non-localized and indiscriminate: "It's a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised" (1980:156).
• "power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday live" (1980:39).
• As such power can move "through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions" (1980:152).
• Power is precisely so strong because "it produces effects at the level of desire - and also at the level of knowledge. Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it" (1980:59).
• Power and knowledge directly imply one another; these are power-knowledge relations (1977:27).
• Bentham thought the panopticon to be both supervising and correcting the delinquent who "is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (1977:200). The inmate is visible, the surveillance is unverifiable (not knowing when someone is watching): the principle of the dungeon is reversed, daylight is more effective than darkness (1980:147). The technique itself ensures that it does not matter who exercises power, or when since it functions at all times. Also, this system can be integrated into any function, so that the panopticon can spread all throughout the social body, to become a generalized function (1977:107), to form a disciplinary society (1977:209). Then, the disciplinary mechanisms circulate freely, and the centers of observation are disseminated throughout society.
• The new technologies of power "cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus. For they have resource to it; they use, select or impose certain of its methods.
• The new forms of punishment form a "synoptic regime of power, a regime of its exercise within the social body, rather than from above it" (1980:39).
• "the system of power takes a pyramidical form. Hence there is an apex. But even so, even in such a simple case [in the army or the factory], this summit doesn't form the 'source' or 'principle' from which all power derives" (1980:159)
• "a certain correlation between the two processes, global and local, but not an absolute one" (1980:39).

• Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. 

  ____. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (edited by Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon Books.

11 more annotations...

• echnologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject;