In Discipline and Punish, Foucault states: “The disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an ‘evolutive’ time. But it must be recalled that, at the same moment, the administrative and economic techniques of control reveal a social time of a serial, orientated cumulative type: the discovery of an evolution in terms of ‘progress’. The disciplinary techniques reveal individual series: the discovery of an evolution in terms of ‘genesis’. These two great ‘discoveries’ of the eighteenth century - the progress of societies and the geneses of individuals - were perhaps correlative with the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization. A macro- and a micro-physics of power made possible, not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that), but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of dominations. 'Evolutive’ historicity, as it was then constituted - and so profoundly that it is still self-evident for many today - is bound up with a mode of functioning of power. No doubt it is as if the 'history-remembering’ of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns and deeds had long been linked to a modality of power. With the new techniques of subjection, the 'dynamics’ of continuous evolutions tends to replace the 'dynastics’ of solemn events.” (pages 160 - 161).
In other words, the capitalist evolution of the judicial system created new avenues of state control and surveillance that boil down to the very methods of discipline and order enacted by schools, universities, and employers.
Flash forward to March, 2018: The Parkland student’s gun control manifesto includes the following: “Increase Funding for School Security. We believe that schools should be given sufficient funds for school security and resource officers to protect and secure the entire campus. As a school of over 3,000 students, teachers and faculty, Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school was only supplied funds to hire one on-campus armed resource officer by the state.Without backup, this officer’s hesitation proved to be disastrous and allowed for the senseless deaths of people who were killed on the third floor of the 1200 building.Though this idea has been proposed in the past, these funds should not be appropriated from the already scarce funding for public education. Governments should find resources to secure the millions of children that attend public schools without taking away from the quality of education that is offered at these institutions.”
Worth noting from even the pictures of some of the students included in The Guardian article is that most of these student activists are white and middle-to-upper class. Thus, increased surveillance at public schools would benefit white students, but would severely harm students of color, who already deal with poverty, police violence, the school-to-prison-pipeline, and the threat of incarceration. Increasing the security presence at schools will further destabilize the prospects of a fair and safe education for children of color. As Foucault pointed out, increasing security at school represents a “new technique of subjection”. But who is being subjected and who is doing the subjecting? Evidently, it is the state - through its resources, namely armed guards and police officers - that is subjecting children of color and working-class children to even more biometric surveillance and coercion. And as always, this serves the white supremacist capitalist order, because it deepens the educational divides between white children, who get to acquire a proper education, and children of color, who are often systemically prevented from obtaining one.
The Parkland Manifesto is not progressive. It pathologizes the mentally ill, paints violent agents of the state (soldiers and cops) as protectors, ignores the role of Black Lives Matter in laying the groundwork for contemporary, organized mass action, and assumes that the lives of white, wealthier children supersede those of poorer, nonwhite children - that poor, nonwhite children must give up what little material safety they have for the sake of their white, wealthier peers.
These white middle-to-upper class children are colluding with state interests. This March was not progressive. These demands are regressive.
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