What strikes me most about Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison is how normalized and wide-spread these modes of power and dominance and docility are across the world. Foucault writes that, “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power,” and that bodies which are docile can be, “subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”[1] In order to achieve domination over said bodies, discipline must be enforced on them, and this is achieved by four methods that Foucault discusses: distribution of bodies in a space, the control of their activities, the organization of their geneses, and the composition of bodies into forces.[2] The objectification of bodies as cogs in a machine intended for production can be applied in archives in the sense that artifacts and documents function as cogs in an information machine which is utilized for the production of new information. I argue that archivists rely on discipline to exercise control over bodies via records by housing them, organizing them, following collection policies, and by compiling records into collections and exhibits.
Because most records that we collect are about cultures and people, it can be said that records are the embodiment of real bodies that lived. Ramesh Kumar Sharma explores the topic of embodiment and the self, writing that, “[One’s] manifestation to others as a conscious subject becomes possible only through the medium of the body.”[3] But because all bodies die, he argues that, “The self is not ‘existentially’ dependent on the body,” and therefore, “it is possible that the self should not perish along with the death of the present body and go on rather to survive in some other form, whether embodied or otherwise.”[4] When the medium of the body ceases to exist, a different type of body carries on the manifestation of the self. Records are the replacements of bodies that have died or will die. Here we will think of records as bodies. The mere existence of archives already establishes Foucault’s first method of discipline, which is that bodies be distributed in space. First they are enclosed within an institution’s walls, which is represented by a physical repository, then this, “Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed.”[5] Archives enclose records down to the item level, where they are enclosed into envelopes and boxes. This has the purpose of isolating individuals for their assessment, classification, and ranking into hierarchies, and so that each body may be surveilled.
The second method of discipline is the control of activity. This is practiced by establishing rhythms, imposing particular occupations, and regulating the cycles of repetition as a means of regulating time.[6] Records cannot literally perform activities, but archivists are able to impose activities onto them via monitoring record life-cycles, accessioning, deaccessioning, and organizing materials into classification systems. Another way that we see this is in what Foucault calls exhaustive use, where bodies are constantly put to use by the machine so that the use of time may increase into, “Ever more available moments.”[7] This makes me think of the preservation and conservation efforts of archives to use every last bit of time that a record can be useful before its ultimate deaccession and/or disposal.
Third is the organization of geneses, which refers to, “The progress of societies and the geneses of individuals,” that uphold power structures through time.[8] Melissa Adler notes how libraries accomplish this via library classifications, which she argues, “Are in the business of producing and reproducing disciplinary norms within the academy.”[9] She continues that, “Those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge” and that, “they reproduce dominant discourses and produce silences through censorship or undercataloging.”[10] Because archives set their collection policies and project their values and interests on what records they collect, they are able to curate and present a body of information (which often includes dominant narratives) to society that they choose to reproduce. This screening of records limits the ways that society, who uses said records, may think by presenting them with only certain types of information, reproducing an information norm. When archive users engage in research, this facilitates the genesis of new information that upholds the norms set by information institutions.
The fourth method of discipline is the composition of bodies into forces, “In order to obtain an efficient machine.”[11] Foucault says that, “The soldier whose body has been trained to function part by part for particular operations must in turn form an element in a mechanism at another level.”[12] Again, Adler makes the connection between libraries and discipline, stating, “Library materials are placed in sections of the library according to the discipline in which catalogers determine the books intend to participate.”[13] We see this in archives when records at the item level become part of a distinct collection or exhibit. An example could be a record, which represents the individual (like a photograph of Dolores Huerta), being part of a broader collection, which represents a force (a collection about the Chicanx Movement). This is accomplished through the use of metadata and description, which categorize and organize records so that they are more easily identified and aggregated into collections or exhibits. Jeffrey Pomerantz says that, “The word ‘metadata’ indicates something that is beyond the data: a statement or statements about the data.”[14] Thus, metadata contributes to the disciplinary processes by assessing, classifying, and ranking records into hierarchies in the same way that bodies are in society.
Archives today function out of societies that uphold power structures of dominance and docility, and so naturally are designed to further uphold these power relations. Archivists have already been taught by society to perpetuate norms and judgments. When dealing with records, which are pseudo-bodies of the masses, it makes sense that archivists would feel an almost natural obligation to objectify the cultures and life experiences of people via their records, and to regulate and control them. Archives further contribute to the regulation and control of living bodies by exposing them to dominant discourses that the institutions reproduce so that the population can abide by.
[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1995), 136.
[2] Foucault, 141-169.
[3] Ramesh Kumar Sharma, “Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Disembodied Existence,” Philosophy East and West 61, no. 1 (2011): 7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23015253.
[4] Sharma, 29.
[5] Foucault, 143.
[6] Foucault, 149.
[7] Foucault, 154.
[8] Foucault, 160.
[9] Melissa A. Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012): 370, https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-317.
[10] Adler 370-371.
[11] Foucault, 164.
[12] Foucault, 164.
[13] Adler 371.
[14] Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), 6.
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