Key Arguments

• Foucault’s third point states that the "carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough."
• He characterizes the relation from disciplinarian to disciplined as one of pure "signalization": the goal is "not of understanding the injunction but of perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code."
• Discipline "Place[s] the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in everything the least representation, and the smallest murmur’"; Boussanelle describes the disciplined soldier as beginning "to obey whatever he is ordered to do; his obedience is prompt and blind; an appearance of indocility, the least delay would be a crime".
• The same method is applied to schoolchildren: "few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted only by signals – bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher, or that little wooden apparatus used by the Brothers of the Christian Schools; it was called par excellence the ‘Signal’ and it contained in its mechanical brevity both the technique of command and the morality of obedience."
• The Brother’s manual explicitly sacralizes the signal: its "first and principal use" is to draw all pupils’ attention to the teacher; the good pupil, hearing it, "will imagine that he is hearing the voice of the teacher or rather the voice of God himself calling him by his name" and will respond like Samuel: "Lord, I am here."
• A detailed code links different patterns of strikes on the Signal to specific required actions in reading; the teacher "will strike the signal once" to stop or start; twice "in rapid succession" to make a pupil repeat a badly read word; three times in succession to signal going back farther in the text, continuing "till the pupil finds the word which he has said incorrectly".
• The mutual improvement school intensifies this logic, making even verbal commands elements of signalization: orders like "Enter your benches" and "Take your slates" are decomposed into synchronised gestures that must follow each word of command, so that children’s movements become tightly coded responses to linguistic cues.
• This system exemplifies how disciplinary power operates not by persuasion or shared understanding but by a prearranged code of signals and compulsory, immediate reactions that form the basis of a combinatory machine of forces.

Source Quotes

By the new method, each of the 360 pupils writes, reads or counts for two and a half hours’ (cf. Bernard). 3. This carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough.

This carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough. From the master of discipline to him who is subjected to it the relation is one of signalization: it is a question not of understanding the injunction but of perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code.

All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough. From the master of discipline to him who is subjected to it the relation is one of signalization: it is a question not of understanding the injunction but of perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code. Place the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in everything the least representation, and the smallest murmur’; the disciplined soldier ‘begins to obey whatever he is ordered to do; his obedience is prompt and blind; an appearance of indocility, the least delay would be a crime’ (Boussanelle, 2).

From the master of discipline to him who is subjected to it the relation is one of signalization: it is a question not of understanding the injunction but of perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code. Place the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in everything the least representation, and the smallest murmur’; the disciplined soldier ‘begins to obey whatever he is ordered to do; his obedience is prompt and blind; an appearance of indocility, the least delay would be a crime’ (Boussanelle, 2). The training of schoolchildren was to be carried out in the same way: few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted only by signals – bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher, or that little wooden apparatus used by the Brothers of the Christian Schools; it was called par excellence the ‘Signal’ and it contained in its mechanical brevity both the technique of command and the morality of obedience.

Place the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in everything the least representation, and the smallest murmur’; the disciplined soldier ‘begins to obey whatever he is ordered to do; his obedience is prompt and blind; an appearance of indocility, the least delay would be a crime’ (Boussanelle, 2). The training of schoolchildren was to be carried out in the same way: few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted only by signals – bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher, or that little wooden apparatus used by the Brothers of the Christian Schools; it was called par excellence the ‘Signal’ and it contained in its mechanical brevity both the technique of command and the morality of obedience. ‘The first and principal use of the signal is to attract at once the attention of all the pupils to the teacher and to make them attentive to what he wishes to impart to them.

Thus, whenever he wishes to attract the attention of the children, and to bring the exercise to an end, he will strike the signal once. Whenever a good pupil hears the noise of the signal, he will imagine that he is hearing the voice of the teacher or rather the voice of God himself calling him by his name. He will then partake of the feelings of the young Samuel, saying with him in the depths of his soul: “Lord, I am here.” ’ The pupil will have to have learnt the code of the signals and respond automatically to them.

The mutual improvement school was to exploit still further this control of behaviour by the system of signals to which one had to react immediately. Even verbal orders were to function as elements of signalization: ‘Enter your benches. At the word enter, the children bring their right hands down on the table with a resounding thud and at the same time put one leg into the bench; at the words your benches they put the other leg in and sit down opposite their slates … Take your slates. At the word take, the children, with their right hands, take hold of the string by which the slate is suspended from the nail before them, and, with their left hands, they grasp the slate in the middle; at the word slates, they unhook it and place it on the table’.13 To sum up, it might be said that discipline creates out pf the bodies it controls four types of individuality, or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular (by the play of spatial distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities), it is genetic (by the accumulation of time), it is combinatory (by the composition of forces). And, in doing so, it operates four great techniques: it draws up tables; it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly, in order to obtain the combination of forces, it arranges ‘tactics’.

Key Concepts

• 3. This carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command.
• All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough.
• From the master of discipline to him who is subjected to it the relation is one of signalization: it is a question not of understanding the injunction but of perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code.
• Place the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage, that ‘despotically excludes in everything the least representation, and the smallest murmur’
• the disciplined soldier ‘begins to obey whatever he is ordered to do; his obedience is prompt and blind; an appearance of indocility, the least delay would be a crime’ (Boussanelle, 2).
• few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted only by signals – bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher, or that little wooden apparatus used by the Brothers of the Christian Schools; it was called par excellence the ‘Signal’ and it contained in its mechanical brevity both the technique of command and the morality of obedience.
• Whenever a good pupil hears the noise of the signal, he will imagine that he is hearing the voice of the teacher or rather the voice of God himself calling him by his name. He will then partake of the feelings of the young Samuel, saying with him in the depths of his soul: “Lord, I am here.”
• Enter your benches. At the word enter, the children bring their right hands down on the table with a resounding thud and at the same time put one leg into the bench; at the words your benches they put the other leg in and sit down opposite their slates … Take your slates. At the word take, the children, with their right hands, take hold of the string by which the slate is suspended from the nail before them, and, with their left hands, they grasp the slate in the middle; at the word slates, they unhook it and place it on the table

Context

Third numbered point in 'The composition of forces', where Foucault shows that once discipline aims to compose forces efficiently, it must institute a highly codified regime of signals and responses—what he calls training or dressage—that structures both military drill and classroom behaviour through prompt, blind obedience to minimal commands.