Schema, Gaze and Examination: “The Means of Correct Training”

“Hierarchized, continuous, and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical ‘inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it practiced. It was also organized with 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 …” (192).

Three parts of Foucault’s “The Means of Correct Training”—which operates as an individual but also as one part of the mechanized whole of Discipline and Punish and, further, the hybrid text from which our seminar class is observing Foucault and his “apparatus of writing” (202), The Foucault Reader—add knowledge to my existing body and its knowledge, skills and experience derived from working in the military as a civilian from age 18 to 32. As an employee of the U.S. Department of Defense—perhaps the world’s largest employer—and the largest body within that, the U.S. Army and later, the smallest, the U.S. Marine Corps, I have been acutely aware of power structures and dynamics; Foucault’s examination of discipline has my mind turning in and effort to clarify the past. The three parts of Foucault’s “The Means of Correct Training” on which I am focusing are: the concept of the “operational schema”; the “gaze”; and the “examination” made possible through the “whole apparatus of writing.” Words such “schema” (197), “top to bottom” and “integrated system” (see the block quote above) are widened chinks in Plato’s proverbial cavern through which I am glimpsing my experience working within an “automatic, anonymous power.”

The Schema

Working in the field of automotive technical writing in the military, I became intimately familiar with Foucault’s concept of schema—albeit in a more technical, practical context than the concept he puts forth: “this tiny operational schema that has become so widespread …, this formal method of the examination.” He asks if this schema implements “within a single mechanism, power relations that make it possible to extract and constitute knowledge” (197). In the field of writing, documenting and examining not only the technology of the military—tanks, tactical vehicles/trucks, HMMWVs, weapons—but the processes and procedures, and policies by which they are repaired and maintained, the dominating force is the writing technology of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Similar to HTML, but more rigorously structured and streamlined, XML makes use of a schema which governs all data and language—knowledge—in the “data set,” rendering publishing of information more systematic than ever before in ways reminiscent of Foucault’s use of the word to apply to power structures in societies. XML is a way to impose rules upon information itself. The hierarchical authority sets the schema, the business rules to which the data must conform. The writer runs the XML data/content through a parsing software—a Foucauldian examination, if you will—and flags anything that does not conform. It is not surprising that the military, from the top down, in every aspect, runs on efficiency, applying policies and running them through “continuous process improvement” programs (mirroring Foucault’s notion of “continuous surveillance”), and sorting through approved/unapproved data as mechanistically as possible in not only the macro level—to the people and groups/sub organizations referred to consistently as replaceable “spokes in the wheel” but down to the micro (sentence) level of its technical data.

The Gaze

It is no surprise that the U.S. military is a male dominated organization. To that end, its female employees become used to the “normalizing gaze, a surveillance that make it possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish” (197). Contrary to Foucault’s statement, they do “receive directly the image of the sovereign power” in addition to feeling “its effects … on their bodies” (199). This “normalizing gaze” serves to uphold the existing power structures, namely, predominantly (white) male leadership at virtually all organizational levels. Women were classified by their level of attractiveness. For instance, one of the women I know who were passed up for a promotion for the job they had already been doing, had a male coworker tell her he was sorry, and that this wouldn’t happen to a “pretty woman or a man.” A woman I know who served on an interview panel said that she wouldn’t hire the female candidate; she was too attractive and would “distract the Soldiers.”

Writing and Examination

“The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them,” Foucault writes (201). In the military, there are indeed “a whole mass of documents that capture and fix” individuals. At the end of each year, each employee must submit a written report of their “significant accomplishments”; however, since most supervisors used this documentation trail as a means of surveillance, this became all accomplishments. Employees had to state their case, in a 12+ page written statement, how they accomplished each of their 12-25 written objectives. These “procedures of examination were accompanied at the same time by a system of intense registration and of documentary accumulation. A ‘power of writing’ was constituted as an essential part in the mechanisms of discipline” (201). Verbal discourse was not valued so much as written; if it wasn’t in writing, or documented, it didn’t happen. “The whole apparatus of writing” “that accompanied” the examination made it possible to describe and analyze a person as an “object” to “maintain” “under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge” (202).

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “The Means of Correct Training.” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, pp 188-205.