//From disciplinary enclosures to open modulations: pedagogy in the societies of controlled temporalities - 2024
[This text was presented during the panel discussion 'Lateral Avant Garde(s), Unattained Modern and Contemporary Sandwichings,' organised by Hekh Colloquium on Call #1]
The battle between Zeus and Chronos led to the formation of institutions. Chronos, the devourer of his own offspring, was harnessed by the political God Zeus and transformed into a state archive. The Temple of Mnemosyne, which always welcomes the survivors of Chronos's onslaught, became the modern public record office (Guha, 2002).
Time is an all-encompassing yet implicit phenomenon. Since we presume time in all our experiences, expressions and actions, it is unthinkable and catastrophic unless it is socially harnessed and organised. Therefore, throughout history, all cultures have organised time. However, modern societies have uniquely organised time in abstract symbols and units. Following Gill Deleuze's theory of "Society of control" (Deleuze, 1992), I argue that the social taming of Chronos in enclosed units and symbols was followed by the attempt to release its flow, but within regulated and controlled modulations. In this text, I will examine the transformation of modern pedagogy in relation to the shift in the order of time from the modern to the contemporary paradigm. I will do this by considering two events, one historical and the other personal.
I
The birth of modern education came along with the rise of factories in colonial India. Along with the emergence of time discipline, the reports of factory commissions of the late nineteenth century highlight the emergence of modern education. Thus, the modern time discipline and the modern pedagogy are co-constituted historically in the logic of industrialisation. In other words, understanding time as an abstract and atomistic succession of instants was foundational in shaping our learning abilities.
The connection between modern education and industrial discipline is a widely discussed topic in the European context. According to Michel Foucault, disciplinary societies peaked at the beginning of the 20th century, extending the logic of the Middle Ages' monastic order (Foucault, 1975). In industrial society, devotion to God is transformed into devotion to profit. Similarly, in his article "Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," E. P. Thompson further elaborates on the relationship between industrial time discipline and modern education, highlighting how this time discipline entangles the schooling system (Thompson, 1967). In discussing Puritan ethics, Thompson notes that the eighteenth century has heavily indoctrinated the ethical discourse of new industrial time discipline and the criticism of idleness. During this period, time became an invaluable resource, as it cannot be recovered once lost, and it's preaching a primary principle of education.
The emergence of modern education in India can be seen in the report of the first factory commission conducted in 1875 in Bombay to set legislative limits on working hours and protect workers from industrial evils. Surat District Deputy Collector Mr M.C. Entee underlined the importance of education in his response to a letter from the government of India. In section 6 of his report, Entee remarked about the educational facilities in factories for children. He viewed education as an essential means for making children "a source of profit at an early age" (KYDD, 1920). His argument implied that factory employment instilled discipline in children, who might have otherwise been ignorant and lazy in their habits. His response highlights the industrial ethos of education and the internalisation of time discipline as a moral code.
In response to concerns about the safety of women and children working in factories, the government of Bombay established another commission in 1885 to amend the First Factory Act, passed in 1881. The commission observed that children were working without any temporal limitations and recommended fixing labour hours from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M. for children, promoting education to instil the "habits of industry" in their spare time (KYDD, 1920). This half-time system required children to balance work and education. This approach seemed to embed the idea of modern education into industrial training, incorporating its logic of division of space, disciplining of time, and examination or supervision of labour through various measures such as bells, sirens, whistles, financial incentives, timetables, registers, deadlines, fines, and punishments. Additionally, the commission proposed raising the employment age for children to 9 years, except for children with some education to be granted employment a year earlier, following the English Factory Act (KYDD, 1920).
In 1890, a committee formed entirely of locals found that the half-time policy for children was not followed by the expected steps to educate children. The committee observed that "the children employed as half-timers would run wild and fall into bad companies" (KYDD, 1920). It suggested that the local government facilitate factory schooling to keep the children under control. However, in 1906, the committee made another attempt to address this issue within the enclosures of the law. It brought to light the demands of the factory workers that the law should enforce a compulsory provision to establish a teacher and education facilities in the mill premises. Although not mandatory, the committee strongly felt the need to encourage and promote education for children working in the factories. Furthermore, this time, the committee proposed that a certificate for educational standards should be mandatory for young people working in the factories (KYDD, 1920).
At the beginning of the 20th century, several attempts were made to establish schools on the mill premises. Some mills in Bengal attempted to establish their schools. Attempts were also made in Madras's Buckingham and Carnatic cotton mills in 1908. However, more concrete steps were taken a few years later, and a building was erected in the 18-acre compound of a mill in Madras (KYDD, 1920).
In 1918, a pamphlet from the Bureau of Education described that the initial aim of the school in Madras Mill was to encourage a boy who wanted to pursue his career as a writer (KYDD, 1920). Given that the factory school aimed to train workmen, a question arose "about how to transform the boy's ideas into something more useful and industrious." The school curriculum included technical instructions for textile skills such as spinning, weaving, practical electricity, and geometric and machine drawing. To assess children for work promotion, the school periodically conducted examinations by European officers in the respective departments, which shows its proximity to the factory logic of supervision and inspections of workers. Inquiring about the effects of school on the production of the factories, the European official remarked that they are significant. They noted that educated boys stood out from others in terms of their intelligence and cleanliness. The school's success in Madras Mill led to the Factory Industrial Commission of 1916-18 mandating education for all children regardless of their employment in the factory. This fission of the enclosure resulted in a specialised disciplinary space, which emerged in the factory but moved beyond its physical containments to form another enclosure. According to Foucault, these enclosures ordered the body's potentialities, on the one hand, by increasing its force on economic and productive levels and, on the other, by channelling its flow to enforce obedience on political levels. He claimed that societies of discipline replaced societies of sovereigns and operated differently, organising the subject's everyday life as opposed to only claiming its death or directly organising the production of work instead of merely collecting taxes from the people. In modern societies, settings of disciplines are uniquely organised in different enclosures that a subject moves between throughout its life (Deleuze, 1992). The enclosure of school, in Foucault's words:
This transmutation and fission of enclosures, later on, shifted to become a more complex organisational power, which Deleuze calls "the society of control" that did not take the logic of enclosure as its necessity. The school gave way to complex networked cooperations. This marked a shift in the industrial ethos and its associated time discipline, transforming the power of disciplinary enclosures into a more flexible, free-floating and sophisticated form of control. The time discipline of factories is one such form of enclosure that requires first enclosing the subject in its abstract units only to release it in a new set of forces, more transient fields that modulate rather than discipline. In other words, the modulated release of Chronos necessitated its enclosure first.
But how did this transformation of time and power impact the pedagogy?
II
In August 2024, I enrolled in doctoral coursework, which included a module on "Teaching and Learning Essentials." This eight-week short course aimed at preparing the researchers for future teaching. The course introduced a form of meta-cognition by teaching students how to teach, placing them in a blurred category of being both a student at the requisite stage and a teacher at the prospective stage simultaneously. The introduction section of the course manual cites the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which states that "higher education is becoming a major driver of economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy. The imperative for countries to improve employment skills calls for quality teaching within educational institutions". The course manual adds to this quotation that "Therefore, the quest for ensuring quality in teaching must be intently pursuit rather than being left to hit and trial methods, instincts and intuitions." For this "intently pursuit," the course elaborated a model of teaching, which they called "instructional design activities" that facilitate active learning on three levels, i.e., behavioural, cognition and constructivist. In addition, it promoted establishing learning outcomes at the outset and ensured that the evidence of learning from the students aligns with the outcomes. Moreover, this evidence is collected on a continuous basis, promoting "perpetual learning" rather than relying on end-of-term summative assessments (PETERS, 2011)
According to Immanuel Wallerstein, while the capitalist economy's outward expansion (from Europe to the ‘peripheries’) eventually reaches its physical limits, the internal processes of labour discipline and land commoditisation never fully exhaust themselves (Wallerstein, 1974). Modern pedagogy at this stage reaches its peak sophistication, expanding the logic of labour discipline through instructional design activities. Although the disciplinary walls remain intact, discipline is not imposed by confining the subject within disciplinary enclosures but by modulating its behaviour, cognition and social construction through continuous assessments.
Peggy A. Ertmer and Timothy J. Newby's article "Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing Critical Features From an Instructional Design Perspective" provides a structured foundation for instructional design activities. Instructional theories began with the leading behavioural framework in the 1950s. On the level of behaviour, the overt performance of the student is modulated by the stimulus. The role of the instructor is to invoke a desired response from the learner through a target stimulus (Ertmer & Newby, 2013). For instance, showing a math flashcard depicting the equation "2 + 4 =?" will produce the desired response of "6" (Ertmer & Newby, 2013), or when every attempt of learner's participation is responded to with a thumbs-up or clapping emoticon in an online class inadvertently promotes motivation for more participation. In other words, the subject is pushed indirectly to be reactive to the conditions of its surroundings through behavioural incentives rather than actively discovering them (Ertmer & Newby, 2013). Ertmer and Newby claim that this behavioural technique enables the instructional designer to "produce observable and measurable outcomes in students" and impact their performance through tangible rewards and informative feedback (Ertmer & Newby, 2013). These behavioural incentives are an evolved version of the work incentives that kept the workers in the factory. They give the workers a false sense of control and convert their sense of achievement into profit by stimulating more work. In the late 1950s, the instructional design shifted its theoretical mode from behaviourism to cognitivism, penetrating deeper from external behavioural responses to the direct modulation of the mind. With a surgical attempt, the instructor shifted its pedagogy from the modulations of observable behaviours to processes such as thinking, problem-solving, language, concept formation and information processing. In the words of Ertmer and Newby, "Learning is equated with discrete changes between states of knowledge rather than with changes in the probability of response." Through this evolution, an instructor reaches the most private core of the learner. It can not only access the learner's cognitive qualities, intricacies of mental structures and information stored in memory and imagination. It can commensurate, organise, and analyse the student's learning tendencies to eliminate barriers. With this, a subject reaches its most vulnerable stage and is completely rendered naked in front of its teacher. But in the societies of control, the authoritative figure of the teacher is dead. For instance, as part of its last assignment, the course asked the researchers to organise a micro-teaching session, which the peers will assess (and not judge). Essentially, with the death of the teacher, we find ourselves exposed to one another. Finally, in the constructivist methods of instructional design, the instructor taps into the social world of the learner. For Louis Althusser, every social formation must continually renew its conditions of production to survive. He argues that the school serves as a primary institution where these relations of production are consistently reproduced, shaping how society perceives relationships. In constructivist instructional design, the teacher steps back completely from a position of authority. Since learning always occurs within a social context, the instructor facilitates conversation and collaboration, fostering a supportive social environment. Social relations, ideologies, and worldviews are developed by directly shaping the learner's social surroundings.
While a worker was enclosed within the physical space of the factory, the division of labour, and the constraints of time dictated by the clock and modern calendars in the late nineteenth century, the 'learner' beyond the late 20th century is free of these restraints. The mutating modulation of the learner's behaviour, mental processes, and social milieu takes precedence over its disciplinary cast and is constantly being evaluated in the society of control. These parameters are tested, and the evidence is continually assessed in alignment with the learning objectives. In this way, a subject is never out of control as it is no longer inside it. It is by exercising our freedom that we are being controlled. For example, just as a strict teacher silences talking in class to encourage order, composure, focus and discipline, controlled societies promote communication to generate data effectively, leading to effective control. Disciplinary society reduces a person embedded into the fabric of society to the unit of the individual; in a controlled society, the individual is transformed into a di-vidual, into multiple units of data, becoming a set of statistics within the smooth flow of numbers.
This age is uniquely characterised by its organisation of time as the control through time superseded the discipline of subjects in space. In the pre-modern age, time was experienced qualitatively, where the expansion and contraction of the day was based on the tasks performed and accomplished in it (Thompson, 1967). Industrialisation led to time being measured in abstract quantities for more efficient and impersonal management of work and the generation of profits. This abstract disciplinary time has now evolved into an unbounded temporality. It is regulated by ever-postponing and self-deforming continuity of cooperation and networks (Deleuze, 1992). A mole's disciplinary burrows transform into a serpent's modulated coils.
In the classes of active learning, the reorganisation of time rendered the subject's agency completely passive, making intended learning inevitable. Consequently, in a society of no finality, the scope of being a bad student is rendered obsolete.
This leads me to ask: when disciplinary boundaries constrain a subject and then let it float free into the open networks, when the lateral coils of the serpent represent a deeper level of control than the vertical burrows of the mole, when the means of alternatives, state of being variables and practices of freedom are themselves being co-opted, how can we envision any mode of free practice? Within this bilateral subsumption of freedom, the escape route can be imagined only in a constant mode of oscillation from one extreme to the other.
References
• Althusser, L. (1970). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. La Pensée.
• Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. The MIT Press.
• Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (2013). Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing Critical Features From an Instructional Design Perspective. P E R F O R M A N C E I M P R O V E M E N T Q UA R T E R LY, 2 6 ( 2 ) P P. 4 3 – 7 1.
• Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.
• Guha, R. (2002). History at the Limit of World-History. Columbia University Press.
• KYDD, J. C. (1920). A HISTORY OF FACTORY LEGISLATION IN INDIA. University of Calcutta.
• PETERS, M. A. (2011). EDUCATION AND 'SOCIETIES OF CONTROL': FROM DISCIPLINARY PEDAGOGY TO PERPETUAL TRAINING. Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice.
• Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Oxford University Press.
• Wallerstein, I. (1974). From Feudalism to Capitalism: Transition or Transitions? Social Forces.
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| From left to right: Shveta Sarda (editor and translator), Praveen Ashokan (Researcher), Priyank Gothwal (Artist and researcher), Anurag Singraur (Artist) |