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🪵 The Threshold

Disciplinary power is a network function, not a possessed property

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, deepthinking, definitional_content, trade, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 273

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Disciplinary power is a network function, not a possessed property

Evidence

It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised. The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a ‘head’, it is the apparatus as a whole that produces ‘power’ and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 273

Categorization

  • XREF: The mechanism by which the panopticon is internalized — nobody owns surveillance in Oceania either; it is systemic and self-sustaining. — connects to: Disciplinary power fixes a coercive link between body and object rather than extracting products. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 234; Discipline is a type of power, not an institution or apparatus — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 338; Power is code-guided communication, not a property possessed by anyone (+5 more)
  • DEEPTHINKING: Distributed, self-sustaining power without an owner is the paradigm-shifting core that makes internalized surveillance possible.

Broader Connections

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