Dismantling Power:

A Dissenting Teaching Portfolio

Borne along by the omnipresence of the mechanisms of discipline, basing itself on the carceral apparatuses, [normalizing power] has become one of the major functions of our society. The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 304

The impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, ‘I will no longer obey,’ and throws the risk of their life in the face of an authority they consider unjust seems to me to be something irreducible. Because no authority is capable of making it utterly impossible.

Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3, 449.