Foucault’s Homogenized Progression, thoughts on School, Prison, and Healthcare

Michel Foucault is a contemporary French philosopher focused on the social construct, mainly in the homogenization of the collective society.  In his essay Discipline and Punish he delves into the ideas controlling people and forcing them toward a common rationale.  In Discipline and Punish, he focuses on the system of incarceration in the modern world, and how it can be set up to better control people equally and sternly.  I mean incarceration not in the modern day sense, but rather in the sense that everyone is incarcerated, kept from exploring primal avenues and forced to remain within the lines of expressionary madness and melancholia. Foucault organizes the types of control into three sections, which can be visibly seen in each form of this progression.  The first is hierarchical observance; this is where everyone has someone to respond to, and arranged ‘that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it’s discontinuous in its action’ (DP).  This means that it must be instilled in the individual that they’re always being watched, to make sure that they are always kept within the boundaries that they’re supposed to be.  They use negative conditioning to maintain the thought in people that they must not make any mistakes or suffer the consequences.  The second tier is normalizing judgment, this is where they place guidelines that every person must follow, this can be standards, quotas, mortality rates in hospitals, and so on.  These are prominently seen in the categories discussed below, and should be kept in mind while going through them to see a common theme in every instance of our lives to this point, and even for the rest of the time we have on earth.  The third, and final, category in Foucault’s view of control is examination.  This is basically a combination of the two former categories combined into a single one.  This is what I’ll refer to below as power, it’s forcing people to grow intellectually while continuing to show results, or suffer the consequences from being graded negatively.  I aim to show that the progression from birth to death is strewn with this kind of homogenization, and those who falter from it is considered ‘insane’.  Modern day society is tasked with choosing regulations that everyone must fall into, and its outcasts provide glimpses at what is being suppressed.  Systematically, let’s start with childhood.  

Around the age of 5 they’re forced into school, something usually nerve-racking for most young children. They have to go to a place they’ve never been, surrounded by people they don’t know and they’re getting taught things they have no interest in learning, they’d still rather be our own person doing whatever they’d like. This is the first stage of being thrown out of our comfort zone. They become increasingly dependent on our teachers, the one sign of adult comfort they can find, and they accomplish every task requested of us. They have rules, something that they haven’t become accustomed to fully yet, and by a person they hardly know, giving us a feeling of subservience to this bigger, stronger being who stands in front of us with a stern voice. To look at the classrooms, the students are forced to sit straight and face the teacher who is basically on a pedestal because everyone has to look at them and not each other. This form of power establishes that there is one person in charge of the classroom. Distractions like the beautiful outside world are given to the students if they just look to their left or right, however, the teacher will catch this and make an example of them. This is preparing them for the outside world, there will be distractions but you must remain in control of yourself and fully devoted to the person or power that is in charge of you at that given time, a very valuable lesson for such young and open minded people. The most important lesson, however, which children are taught through school, is reason. The problem is that they’re taught reason in following orders; they have to learn to associate success with accomplishing tasks, and guilt or shame with failing to meet requirements. Children in lower brackets of education aren’t taught to think critically and for themselves, they learn how to survive upon dependence rather than instinct. In lower tiers of education, there are standards, and very little opportunity to make decisions regarding one’s future; they’re obligated to take certain classes with only a few selections given within the constraints of school. Once high school has ended, then they’re given the first real choice of their lives.
This choice comes when they’re 18, they’re still deciding who they are and who they’d like to be, but then are confronted with a selection of 3 basic choices. One option is they can continue in school, it’s confortable for them, they’ll be better off in the future, and they can continue keeping themselves from the work force. The second is they can get into the workforce; they can become a cog in the wheel of industry and start making money. The third choice is the military; they can give themselves up and be selflessly a member in fighting for their country. Each of these choices seems to be organically different in nature, but the fact of the matter is they all have the same outline as the original school framework is, and they’ll see this in more detail in the next paragraph. Because the children are molded into this, it makes it much easier for them to adjust to the same expectations from those in power after they’ve transferred to the next stage of life.

Since school has already been covered, I’ll move on to industry. Industry is in the same form because the individual is forced to work for a boss who is in complete control over them. They are forced into a routine, just like in school, where they must show up and complete tasks in an orderly fashion in order to remain employed and getting paid. There is a hierarchy, just like in school, that must be followed. The worker answers to their manager, or assistant manager, who in turn has to answer to their higher up, and so on. Everyone has someone to answer to, showing that even those who are in power still must remain in between the lines in order to keep their job. In industry, there is a very strict example of Foucault’s three views on control. The observation comes into play with supervisors, who then report back to the managers and CEOs of companies. They practice a type of non-observance that shows workers that even if someone isn’t looking over your shoulder, the second you make a mistake someone will catch it and make sure action is taken. The normalizing judgment comes in with the guidelines and standards everyone has to live up to. For most workers there are quotas that have to be met in order to stay employed. There also are percentages of growth in a company that the CEO or the board must see or internal changes will be executed. Power is really shown through the examination. Most companies do quarterly to yearly progress reports on each of its workers and the company as a whole. As well as testing the smaller parts of the machine, they also have take suggestions and input from the workers about how the managers, bosses, etc. are doing, everyone has a system of checks and balances they must succumb to in order to remain where they are or move up. This type of examination also sets the tone in an office setting for all of the workers. If one person is fired they’ll know that it’s serious and they should step up their work, overall keeping them always fearful and hardworking. This is the second of the three choices that can be made after compulsory education, the third being the military.

This is obvious, but the military is the ultimate stripping of power from people and being forced to homogenize fully into a unit. The military may be the most classical idea of uniformity amongst peoples, with routine at the forefront. The military will force you to turn away from self and rely on the group, giving power to everyone but yourself. Now you’re serving your country at the expense of your own individuality. There are hierarchies in the military, shift lead, lieutenant, commander, captain, general, etc. Though each of these people may seem to have power in their own right, they still completely rely on one another, because each unit is only as strong as its weakest link. They are made to be completely void of themselves, and like the other two categories, undergo examination to maintain strength and ultimate subservience.

The importance of these three categories are that they’re up to the individual, they are choices that can be made in any order or combination, and these are the most basic forms of any real choice man has today. With that said, we’ll move onto the three avenues that are not necessarily choices made by man: hospitalization, and incarceration in a prison or an asylum.

Hospitalization occurs when a person is sick physically and cannot reason their way out of it. They’re put into a hospital where, keeping along with the theme of uniformity, they are forced in a bland room and at the mercy of their doctor. This is exactly like school; they shouldn’t feel any sense of difference because they’ve been in the same environment for their entire lives with a different mask. There are two different cases that happen in hospitals, one which leads to the person leaving with a sense of power, granted by the doctor, and the other which forces them to completely rely on the doctor who’s tasked with healing them. In the case that the power is granted to the person, they’re given a set of rules that must be followed or the next time they’re in they’ll be devoid of all power they’ve been granted, this is the last chance they get to have control over their own lives before it’s stripped from them. In this instance, they are thought to have the power, but they’re still at the mercy of the doctor because they must trust and rely that what the doctor is saying will change their lives. They’re given regulations and rules, just like in the above examples of school, military, and work. For example a person is told, take this three times a day, or run once a week and so on, they’re again given a false sense of security in being able to rely on their own reason, because it failed them once before, therefore being left without and real power. In the other instance, the doctor must confine them to a room and leave the person without any hope of self-preservation, it’s all up to the doctor, and in the instance that they’re given a clean bill of health, they’ll be given the same false power that the former example has been handed.

When incarcerated in a prison setting, the prisoner has given up his rights because he didn’t follow the rules handed to him by the lawmakers. The individual will be either in the school, industry, or military field for it’s specified times like 9 to 5 or 8 to 8, but when they’re given the freedom of being outside their respective routines, they let too much of their primal nature out. In the prison setting, they are given the same clothes, the same food, the same everything, this is the first step of the forced homogenization. They have a routine, as the others do, and they must follow it or be placed in more extreme circumstances. They are under constant watch by people who control the power completely; the guards supply their food, water, entertainment, and responsibilities. Jail is an expedited version of the three choices normally given to individuals at 18, they reteach everything to them to try to get them back to the same standard everyone else is in. Looking at numbers, there is a much higher percentage of the world that leads normal lives than those who are incarcerated, therefore the system set up must be working correctly, this is why they put them back through the gauntlet everyone else partakes in. They’re taught normal standards in classes that most people learn by 18, they have to go to work and follow orders from a boss as well as answer to a supervisor, and they’re given almost a military style mental breakdown to where they discover the problem and how to correct it. The prisoners go through examination, otherwise known as parole, in which they decide whether the person has been converted back to a contributing member of society. If they change according to the standards laid out for them, they’re released back into the workforce where they’re just like everyone else. The last, and most serious form of attempted rehabilitation is placement in an asylum.

An asylum is the most serious form of rehabilitation because for the most part it deals with people who are unable to be changed and molded back into the ideal homogenized form that the rest of society must conform to. The people deemed ‘insane’ are those that succumb to their primal instincts and refuse to buy into the reason that’s fed to them from childhood. They have routines like the rest of us, but the responses to their respective goals are taken much more lightly than the rest of society. The clinically insane are not punished in the same way as us, nor do they have the fear instilled in them by their higher ups, they live seemingly standardly, as children do before they’re sent into school. Whether the person has driven himself or herself to madness, or it resulted from a chemical imbalance in the brain, they are no longer able to reason adequately to our standards, and therefore must be taken out of the society where power and reason are necessary for existence.

In conclusion, from birth to death there is a common theme of homogenization, it’s something that we’ve been brought up conditioned to live with and if we try to break out we’re sentenced to one of the three subcategories of traditional society. Michel Foucault introduces the nature of society as a whole, but has underdeveloped the underlying apparent progression of this homogenization in our lives from start to finish, something that is very hard to look past.

References
http://dalessandroart.blogspot.com/2013/04/horkheimer-adorno-and-foucault.html
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault, Chapter 3: The Insane.