Discipline and Time
"Hierarchized continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of thegreat technical 'inventions' of the eighteenth century," according toFoucault, but institutional surveillance nonetheless expresses a social,economic, and political need of a capitalist society (176). Disciplineoperates as a power structure and functions as a social technology.Discipline finds expression through various social institutions, from themilitary to the factory, to the school. The purpose of discipline andtraining is not necessarily to create a unified mass out of a collection ofindividuals but to individuate the means of production according to theneeds of the manufacturer or capitalist. As a relatively simple structure,the disciplinary hierarchy nevertheless implies the means of social, Discipline, like any mechanical or physical technology, is design
Within this Puritanical, capitalistframework, time was wasted if not spent producing product and preparing itfor potential profit. The time-clock preceded and also accompanied the advent of thecapitalist society. Thompson notes that as soon as the currentemployment-based labor system became the dominant model for a productivesociety, the shift from task-orientation to timed labor became codified. Workers haveso deeply internalized the connection between employer surveillance andemployer control of time that developed and developing nations come intoconflict with one another over these very issues. In traditional societies, work is a part oflife, whereas in modern industrialized cultures, work and the rest of lifeare completely separate. Thistype of discipline is accomplished through continual and pervasivesurveillance, not necessarily via cameras or videotape but through anorganized social and professional hierarchy. As such, discipline functions as a transformerof the human will. This shift in the concept of timeaccompanied the shift from artisan and family-based labor systems towardthe factory model. The individual worker, military officer, or student issubordinated to the superior officer or trainer or teacher in order for thesociety as a whole to function according to capitalist means and ends. " "Time is now currency," Thompson notes,"It is not passed, but spent," (61). Thesesurveillance mechanisms serve a social function as well as a practical one:the do not merely maintain law and order in a society. Therefore, the concept of timeevolved from task-orientation, as is evident in village communities, totimed labor (Thompson 60). The owners andcontrollers of the means of production essentially controlled the workers'time, the way they spend their lives. The initial dissociation of time from natural,biological, or seasonal rhythms in traditional or farm-based cultures ledto the modernist notion of time as currency.
Common topics in this essay:
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capitalist society,
social economic political,
means production,
economic political,
thompson notes,
social economic,
timed labor,
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