Disciplinarity, Foucault and LIS by Daryl Barker

        This blog post will take up portions of Foucault’s concepts presented in Part 3 of Discipline and Punish (1995) to better challenge how the practice of classification in library and information studies (LIS) can be a site for critical engagement. I think as I engage in any critical discourse it is important for me to claim the position from which I start. As a male presenting white queer person in the academy, many of my observations are limited by my personal, academic and professional experience stemming from those, and other identities I hold (some which are salient and some which are not to this topic, for instance my status as a veteran). As a first principle I think it is impossible to disengage those facts of my existence from my writing so I will not try to here. Simone Browne points out that much of the debate and discourse around Foucault’s description of Bentham’s Panopticon (and its progeny) omits a glaring fact, the gaze at the center of the disciplinary architecture is a white one.1 Taking this one step further, we can apply Foucault’s own framing to his work. He argues that the construct of disciplinary power is “exercised through its invisibility” and he goes on to say, “at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility.”2 Stated another way, the system for classification is rendered invisible, while the things being classified by that system are rendered hyper-visible.  Browne and Foucault, taken together in this framing highlights the limitations of omitting the whiteness of the gaze from the panopticon discourse itself as being a project of disciplinary power. As Fanon writes in Wretched of the Earth, which features prominently in Browne’s work, “For the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him.”3

        Throughout Discipline, Foucault returns to the similarities between primary and secondary schools, hospitals, the military, and workshops.4 In each of these places he demonstrates how a focus on the practice of discipline occurs. While none of these locales are libraries themselves, they do all have overlapping commitments with LIS. The case of primary and secondary education probably shares the nearest locus where librarians are often engaged in schools directly or indirectly through local programs. In contemporary hospitals the field of bioinformatics or medical librarianship make this a likely site of overlap as well. As a veteran myself, I also personally am aware of the role that technical libraries play on military bases as sites of storage for technical and maintenance related materials, and I imagine these repositories likely exist in modern large workshops as well. For each of these sites, the need is for the disciplinary regime to do its work in producing the desired effect. In the educational setting for instance, Foucault states that discipline “made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding.”5 In reading this portion of Foucault, it is striking to me the regularity with which he employs a very ordered approach to talking about the enforcement of discipline, his ideas are highly structured (if lengthy) and the concepts presented often occurs in triplicate, mirroring the bureaucratic structure of 1960’s France.

The structure of the educational machine then gives way to his conceptualization of control and the subsequent rhythm, imposition of a particular occupation, and regulated cycles of repetition which provide another triad of ordered understandings to apply to the discipline space giving rise to what he calls “the characterization of the individual as individual and the ordering of a given multiplicity.”6 LIS seems to thrive in this space of ordering. And when considered alongside the frame of the disciplinary apparatus LIS mimics what Foucault describes as the correlation between gesture and body with the schema of categorization becoming the form by which the body learns and internalizes the schema of the discipline or alternatively, becomes the form by which the discipline is practiced, depending on which way one chooses to apply the at least two fold meaning of Foucault’s phrase. He goes on later to adopt an explanation that may serve the LIS field as well. In describing how an operational framework that becomes part of the background extracts knowledge and imposes a mechanism of power, he says “It is not simply at the level of consciousness, of representations and in what one thinks one knows but at the level of what makes possible the knowledge that is transformed into political investment.”7 The articulation that the underlying ordering of a system of disciplinarity, a set of specific principles which undergird a mode of approach, say a model of LIS classification, could simultaneously impose control (see also Melissa Adler8) and be definitional to the political thought that emerges during the time of its use, shaping the available modes of considering mechanism of power is an enticing consideration. While I assuredly do not have an answer to this question, using this point as a jumping off point to engage the use of something like a Freirian critical pedagogy (as one example) in library based instruction might shed light on the ways in which the systems of discipline operate in the lived experiences of people who interact with the library, LIS more generally and the artifacts created in this space that then get exported outward.

Notes

1.  Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke Press, 2015), 17. 
2.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 187.
3.  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2007), 37.
4.  Foucault, Discipline, 138.
5.  Foucault, Discipline, 147.
6.  Foucault, Discipline, 149.
7.  Foucault, Discipline, 185.
8. Melissa A. Adler, "Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress," KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION 39, no. 5 (2012):doi:10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-370.