Plague discipline assigned each person a true fixed identity, unlike the festival’s masks

Evidence

Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 308

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Assignment to each individual of his true name, true place’ is the disciplinary inversion of the festival’s unmasking — directly parallel to the telescreen fixing Oceania citizens in their ‘true’ political identities, and to the reader’s building theme of surveillance as identity assignment.
• DEEPTHINKING: The festival/discipline antithesis — masks put on and taken off vs. assignment to a ‘true’ name — is a dense binary the reader would want to sit with, connecting surveillance to the metaphysics of identity rather than mere observation.