FUTURE LABOR

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In my piece Future Labor, I represent disciplinary power, and the way it is applied as a normalizing agent through monitoring the environment of high school—an environment that is related to my personal experience. Disciplinary power carefully manipulates the individual’s position, posture, morphology and behavior, in order to create “docile bodies”. According to Foucault “The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals.” [1] These disciplines can be recognized as man-making mechanisms, to turn individuals into useful, easy to be controlled agents. Individuals are regarded as “human capital” to be produced, normalized and standardized. This disciplinary education leads to the reification of human beings.[2] The conflict between the results of one’s activities and human nature is increasingly prominent the longer the these productive standards are followed. Individuals need to correct themselves constantly in order to adapt to the disciplinary system, to form a self-regulatory, operating mechanical system, which ultimately achieves the objectification of the subject.

In the piece, I reconstruct the classroom of my secondary school by using 3D modeling techniques. A virtual camera is panning around the classroom uninterruptedly. The video of sky is projected on every object in the classroom and it is also present as a background synchronously. The sound of a class bell is triggered according to a timed schedule. When the bell rings, the background video and the projected image on the desks are linearly stretched, which alludes the uniform power of norm-implementing on each individual. There are no walls around the virtual classroom, and it floats in the air. The space looks bright and open, which is a symbol of non-violent, ubiquitous repression and monitoring, and its seeming liberated appearance. As Foucault noted,

“For the old principle of Ίevying-violence', which governed the economy of power, the disciplines substitute the principle of 'mildness-production-profit'. These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multiplicity of men and the multiplication of the apparatuses of production (and this means not only 'production' in the strict sense, but also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructive force in the army).” [3]

“The constitution of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the effect of this projection.”[4]

The words“勤奋开拓，团结向上”which mean “Hard to open up, United and progressive” are demonstrated in front of the classroom as the class slogan, in order to emphasize the goal of minimizing individual interests to achieve collective interests. The flowing red flag signifies the constant examination, characterization and classification of the individual. Examination as a means of monitoring, standardizes all confusion or situation that against the rules, “so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject find himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality.” [5] Here, the power of discipline as an anonymous, modest way completely enfolds each individual, implementing irreversible mandatory domination.[6]

[1] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. (Westminster, MD, USA: Vintage, 1995), 211, http://site.ebrary.com/lib/brown/Doc?id=10235213&ppg=231

[2] Lukács, György, History and Class Consciousness, (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1971)

[3] Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, 219.

[4] Ibid., 221.

[5] Ibid., 178.

[6] Ibid., 222.