Leper exclusion and plague discipline represent two distinct models of power

Evidence

If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 309

Categorization

• XREF: The leper/plague binary (binary exclusion vs. segmenting discipline) is Foucault’s distinction the reader can use to test whether Oceania is exclusion or discipline — the telescreen is clearly discipline (segmentation, individual differentiation) rather than simple banishment. — connects to: Mettray concentrated family, army, workshop, school, and judicial models onto one panoptic subject — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 449; the MOC “The Grammar of Social Form: How Trust, Money, and Power Give Society Its Shape”
• DEFINE: Defines the two foundational models of power: exclusion (leper) versus analytic segmentation (plague) — central to the reader’s panopticism thesis.