Wednesday, October 23, 2013

May The Circle be Unbroken

I am about 80 pages into the Circle. Coincidentally (yes, I am a geek) I am randomly re-reading chunks of Foucault's Discipline and Punish. I ran into this quote and thought it pretty much sums up where the Circle is going.


“…throughout the social body, procedures were being elaborated for distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous behavior, maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation,  registration and recording, constituting on them a body of knowledge that is accumulated and centralized. the general form of an apparatus intended to render individuals docile and useful, by means of precise work upon their bodies, indicated the prison institution, before the law ever defined it as the penalty par excellence.”
--Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, p. 231

But this is just a prediction. One of those reading skills I want my students to be able to do.

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