Disciplinary power shifts from marking time to shaping the act from within
Evidence
What the ordinance of 1766 defines is not a time-table – the general framework for an activity; it is rather a collective and obligatory rhythm, imposed from the outside; it is a ‘programme’; it assures the elaboration of the act itself; it controls its development and its stages from the inside. We have passed from a form of injunction that measured or punctuated gestures to a web that constrains them or sustains them throughout their entire succession. A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 232
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between a timetable (external framework) and a programme (control inscribed inside the act itself) is a pivotal conceptual step in Foucault’s argument about the body’s subjection to time. ‘Time penetrates the body’ is dense, layered, and hard to one-sentence.
- DEFINE: Defines ‘programme’ in contradistinction to ‘time-table’ — the key mechanism distinction for how disciplinary time operates on the act.
- XREF: This internalization of constraint into the body parallels how the telescreen writes the watcher’s surveillance into the subject’s own movements and thoughts — the same move from external framework to internalized control. — connects to: Internalized discipline makes the human inspector functionally superfluous — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 59; Disciplines function as machinery for capitalizing and accumulating time — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 239; Discipline evolved from distributing bodies to composing forces into machines — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 247 (+6 more)
Related
- Disciplinary time breaks acts into anatomically prescribed elemental movements (similarity 0.85)
- Disciplines function as machinery for capitalizing and accumulating time (similarity 0.82)
- Power controls the individual through the segmented, seriated ordering of time. (similarity 0.80)
- Disciplinary time replaced initiatory mastery with graded progressive series (similarity 0.80)
- Disciplinary time-tables descend directly from monastic rules (similarity 0.79)
- Discipline evolved from distributing bodies to composing forces into machines (similarity 0.79)
- Disciplinary power fixes a coercive link between body and object rather than extracting products. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Disciplines function as machinery for capitalizing and accumulating time
#expands(0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 239 - Discipline evolved from distributing bodies to composing forces into machines
#expands(0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 247