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In the years since its publication, Michel Foucalt's "Discipline and Punish" has served as point of discussion in regards to the ramifications and consequences of disciplinary power in modern society. Hull contends that cartoonist Matt Groening deftly applies Foucaldian concepts throughout his television program "The Simpsons" and his book "School is Hell."

The disciplinary institutions secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a microscope of conduct; the fine, analytic divisions that they created formed around men an apparatus of observation, recording and training.

-Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Why is school run like a jail? How come you're so boring? Why are there so many stupid rules? How come these desks are so uncomfortable? How come there is so much emphasis placed on rote memorization? Why are we given so much pointless busy work? How come we need permission to speak?

-Matt Groening, School Is Hell

In the twenty-some years since its publication, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish has had a tremendous impact on contemporary scholarship. Discipline and Punish has been used by criminologists, sociologists, feminists, and philosophers alike to discuss the ramifications and consequences of disciplinary power in modern society. In her article "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," the feminist writer Sandra Lee Bartky, for example, uses Foucault's description of the molded and constructed soldier who has been subjected to disciplinary tactics as a springboard for her analysis of the current social normalization of beauty, deference, and submission faced by women.1 The criminologist Larry Siegel writes of Foucault's significance, "The concept of using harsh discipline and control to 'retrain' the heart and soul of the offenders has been the subject of an important book on penal philosophy-Discipline and Punish by the French sociologist Michel Foucault" (569).

Yet application of Foucault's unique description of the normalizing power aimed at individuals in contemporary society is not limited to the ivory tower world of academics. It is my contention in this paper that pop cartoonist Matt Groening deftly applies Foucauldian concepts throughout his works, notably in his most famous work, the television program The Simpsons, and more thoroughly in his lesser-known book of cartoons entitled School Is Hell.2 This paper will therefore examine the Foucauldian presence found in Groening's work, examine how Groening expands on Foucault, as well as argue the social significance of such a finding.

Foucault's Analysis of Modern Power

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maps out in impressive detail the genealogical history of crime, criminals, discipline, punishment, normality, and abnormality in modern Western culture. We are told by Foucault that modern power differentiates itself from traditional power in that modern power is a "network of relations," that is, "micro-powers." Power according to Foucault is now manifested not so much in the sweeping decree of the monarch as much as by small, local forms of control in which we all share complicity. Furthermore, Foucault maintains that modern power's unique expression is through the particular mode of an immediate hold on the body: "They invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs" (Discipline 25). Modern power is therefore a "mastery of [the body's] forces."

This mastery of forces means that modern power relations are not altogether repressive or prohibitive, but are actually productive; they produce certain types of behavior, certain types of bodies, and, most important, they produce knowledge and truth. Foucault makes clear that what constitutes truth and knowledge in a society does not stand outside of power relations, but is the consequent of dominant discourses. It follows that the "naturality" of anything associated with us as individuals now becomes suspicious thanks to Foucault's revelation of modern power's productive capabilities.

In modern culture, power relations' primary mode of control has been in the form of discipline. Essentially "productive," discipline is motivated by the intent to create certain realities (for example, the wellbehaved and productive student), manifested and inculcated through many specific and detailed techniques. Notable is Foucault's contention that nearly identical disciplinary tactics are directed toward soldiers in the military, criminals in prisons, workers in factories, and students in schools. Foucault cites numerous particular examples, many of which, we will see, are utilized by Groening in his satirical critique of the contemporary education system.

One particular disciplinary tactic Foucault addresses that is used in most social institutions is the careful significance given to spatialized location: bodies are located in specific spaces complete with measured distances and the possibility for isolation. Individualized spaces are created allowing for the supervision of the conduct of each, according to Foucault, in order to "assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits" (Discipline 143). Additionally, individualized spacing allows for symbolic divisions-hierarchizing and ranking based on behavior, merit, intelligence, and so on. Spacing creates boundaries and limitations as well. The purpose of the student's desk, for example, is to ground them in one set space for easy authoritative access, visibility, and control.

Extensive disciplinary control consistently imposed "makes" certain types of individuals. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault cites the example of the soldier:

To begin with, the soldier...bore certain signs: the natural signs of his strength and courage, the marks, too, of his pride; his body was the blazon of his strength and valor .... By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body; the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit. (135)

How are the tactics and techniques of modern disciplinary power implemented, and thus control maintained? Foucault explains it is through surveillance, as well as through a system of reward and punishment. He contends, "The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A perfect eye that nothing would escape and a center towards which all gazes would be turned" (Discipline 173). Surveillance ensures that disciplinary power constantly holds the subjects, "assures the hold of power that is exercised over them," producing the "obedient" subject, the individual "subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him" (Discipline 128-29).

The resulting outcome on a societal level of such intense molding is the thoroughly modern notions of the normal and the abnormal. Foucault explains that disciplinary power "hierarchizes in terms of values the abilities, the level, the 'nature' of individuals" (Discipline 183). He adds,

It introduces, through this "value-giving" measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved .... The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. (Discipline 183)

It may be said that to a large extent the purpose of the modern institutions of the military, the school, and the prison is in all cases to normalize their inhabitants, thereby producing "useful" societal-wide homogeneity.

An area of concern on the issue of normality for Foucault is the convenient lines society draws between the notions of "sanity" and "insanity," "reason," and "madness." In Madness and Civilization, Foucault asks that we consider how these concepts developed historically, which means "we must renounce the convenience of terminal truths, and never let ourselves be guided by what we may know of madness" (Madness ix). It is exactly "terminal truths" about madness that are challenged here; Foucault announces that Madness and Civilization will be an "archeology of the silence" imposed on the mentally ill, revealing the historically tangible social mores that label someone "mad" or not. In other words, he attempts to uncover the notable absence of scientific and medical immutability regarding what has constituted madness throughout the centuries.

Another underlying thesis in Madness and Civilization is that, intricately tied to the identification of someone as "mad," is the notion of confinement. Foucault urges that one consider what it means, and by what conditions, it is decided that an individual be removed from society. Exclusion from and inclusion in society, far from being arbitrary or benign, are overwhelmingly decisive social conceptions that are highly politically charged; the label "abnormal" socially determines a categorically different life for an individual. It is no coincidence according to Foucault that during the seventeenth century, the mad, the poor, the criminal, the unemployed, and the sickly were not only all equally confined (that is, excluded), but also that they were confined together.

Yet another outcome of the question of normality and homogeneity for Foucault is its contrast-precisely determined individuality. That is, within disciplinary power each individual becomes an "individual case" in which the particulars of his/her history are documented and recorded. "That will go on your permanent record" has only become a humorous clichd because we recognize that there is some truth to the threat that one's identity can become petrified due to a long history of documents that recount "who" we are. As Foucault says, "In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels...the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual difference" (Discipline 184). Thus, one as an individual, with an individual history and character, becomes possible within modern disciplinary power.

Foucault readily acknowledges that the modern institutions carry out these disciplinary programs not for sinister reasons, but with benevolent and paternalistic hopes of social order and social utility. Nonetheless, Foucault's implicit message is that his work sounds as a "warning" to the immensely intricate molding capabilities, to the powers of inclusion and exclusion, found within this modern disciplinary phenomenon.

Foucault does offer some hope regarding the suffocating grip of modern disciplinary power to which we are all subjected, to which we all subject. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault describes the possibility for resistance to the stultification of modern disciplinary power. However, it is clear that Foucault does not envision resistance as a grand revolt orchestrated by the righteous and just, that is, a massive overthrow of confines. Instead, resistance occurs within power relations, according to Foucault, therefore, perhaps better described as fissures and breaks in the tightly controlled disciplinary surface. He says, "there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of Revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead, there are a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case" (History 96). These "cleavages in a society" work to disrupt the smooth, well-oiled functioning of the machine of disciplinary power.

Groening: The Foucauldian Cartoonist

In his cartoons, Matt Groening generally captures basic elements of Foucauldian philosophy. It is my contention that Foucault and Groening share a common critical disposition to modern disciplinary control, attacking essentially the same disciplinary tactics.3 A further contention of mine will be that Groening moves beyond Foucault by offering a Nietzschean lightness and humor in the face of Foucault's dismal description of the oppressive force of disciplinary power.

The most obvious area where Foucault and Groening coincide is Groening's brilliant appropriation of the tremendous normalizing power manifested in the contemporary classroom. Cartoon after cartoon of Groening's work subtly yet comically represents how the average student is forced to conform, no matter how empty and arbitrary, to set definitions of "good," "useful," and "normal." This of course is entirely at the expense of what is artistic, spontaneous, creative, and personally meaningful. In a description of nursery school in one cartoon found in School Is Hell, Groening has a young child advising other young children, "This is probably your last chance to be artistic-that's right! Seize the opportunity to experiment with gleeful abandon before they show you how to do it right and ruin everything" [emphasis added]. Here, Groening cleverly recognizes Foucault's point that the purpose in the classroom is to normalize young bodies through years of following discreet directions, while sitting still in one place at a classroom desk. This point is made explicit in one episode of The Simpsons in which students complain about the torturous discomfort of new chiropractic-designed classroom chairs. The teacher responds that they should rest assured; it will only hurt until the young students' bones eventually mold to the shape of the chairs.4

In another cartoon, Groening represents Foucault's understanding of the implicit relation of power and knowledge in modern power through his depiction of a teacher who barks at a cowering student, "What is important is what we say is important!" An expression of the understanding that truth is dictated by the "experts" takes place in one episode of The Simpsons in which little Lisa Simpson challenges the pro-meateating message in a meat industry film strip (confirmed there by a "scientition"); Lisa's teacher's response is to hit a hidden "Independent Thought Alarm" button on her desk that signals to the principal, who decides to remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms because the children are "overstimulated" (i.e., thinking outside the confines of accented "knowlede").

Like Foucault, Groening also recognizes one way that disciplinary control is carried out is through the maintenance of detailed records on each individual's behavior and progress. In one of Groening's cartoons a teacher towers over a student and threateningly says, "I'm afraid that insolent remark about our President will go on your permanent record young man." In a cartoon on high school, Groening shows the result of years of vigilant surveillance through records as a young graduate explains, "For years we've been watching you, grading you, testing you, keeping secret files on you, and you'll be glad to know you're normal! There's nothing to worry about!" The comforting assurance given to the fellow graduates is "You're unspecial, unremarkable, and thoroughly average"-in other words, Foucault's description of the perfectly conformed, perfectly normalized individual.

One reappearing theme in Groening's work is Foucault's understanding of the necessary repetition, monotony, and unstimulating nature of inculcating conformity and control.5 Thus, modern education is not so much a period of inquisitive, lively curiosity as much as it is a period of dampening mollification preparing students for their futures as obedient employees. In one episode of The Simpsons, all the students of the local grade school are forced to wear drab-colored identical uniforms, which rob them of all energy and life. The school superintendent praises the uniforms for their ability to deaden all spontaneity in the children, preparing the children for their future "factory jobs."6 When caught in a rainstorm, the uniform colors start to bleed, resulting in bright rainbows of tie-dye colors. The students awaken from a visual slumber and literally come to life. Continuing with this same theme, in one cartoon in School Is Hell, Groening describes school as "crushing boredom." Another cartoon has a college student complaining, "my sense of intellectual curiosity has been deadened by years of boredom."

Another incredible application of Foucault by Groening is the continual comparison he makes between school and jail; it is a theme that appears in many of Groening's cartoons. On the topic of nursery school in one cartoon, Groening shows a child saying, "You mean it's not a jail for children?" to which he receives the answer, "Goodness sake, no. That won't begin for another year or two!" In another cartoon on junior high, Groening depicts a young student saying, "Junior High is a holding pen designed to help us through our formative 'snotty' years." It is no coincidence, both Foucault and Groening would agree, that the modern school mimics the prison and the prison mimics the modern school.

Groening, like Foucault, also captures the suspiciously arbitrary and blurred line drawn between sanity and insanity. In one episode of The Simpsons, the family visits someone in a mental hospital and, upon entering, are given badges with "SANE" stamped largely on them, presumably for the purpose of not accidentally confusing the sane for the insane. In another episode of The Simpsons entitled "Stark Raving Dad," one of Homer's white work shirts is accidentally dyed pink in the laundry. The next scene shows a mass of nuclear power plant workers-a sea of indistinguishable white shirts-marching into the plant for a day's work. Homer, in his pink shirt, is singled out immediately by his boss, Mr. Burns, as being a "radical pink-clad troublemaker."7 Mr. Burns forces Homer to take a "sanity test," yet Homer allows his son Bart to fill it out for fear of failing. Predictably, Homer does fail the test and is placed in the "New Bedlam Rest Home for the Emotionally Interesting." Again, Homer's "crime" (since, as Foucault would point out, the criminal and the madman are treated quite similarly) is that Homer distinguished himself, no matter how silly and trivial the manner, challenging traditional mores.

Yet, what is arguably the most Foucauldian theme that appears in Groening's work is his constant nudging toward a resistance to the suffocating disciplinary control of, particularly, school. Example after example run through Groening's work: The cover of School Is Hell shows a student compliantly writing over and over on the board the phrase "I must remember to be cheerful and obedient." The next page depicts the same image with the same beginning, "I must remember...," but now, rebelliously scrawled beneath it is "School is Hell." In another example,

Groening portrays a young child's wise assessment that "trouble is the maladaptive social response of an inquisitive youth to a stultifying educational environment."8 Still another cartoon offers advice in the interest of self-preservation on how not to deal with the situation of being smarter than your teachers-not to say the following, no matter how true: "The crime is not that I rebelled, the crime is that the other kids do not-that they are too bored and defeated to challenge the stultifying rules, the abuse of power and the sheer joylessnes of everyday school life.9 Thus, like Foucault, Groening's consistent message to young people disgusted with the banality of the school system is to recognize the inanity of it all and to create fissures, to resist the normalization.

This last area of overlap holds great significance since it is, in fact, the area where Groening expands on Foucault in a true Nietzschean manner9 by offering an alternative to Foucault's assessment of a largely controlled vacuous existence in the modern era. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche contends that "not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity"(153). Groening arguably follows such advice in his treatment of what Foucault reveals in his genealogical study of discipline and punishment. Where Foucault's conclusion to these findings is to offer pessimistically little hope in regaining (or, perhaps, in gaining anew) ourselves from normalizing disciplinary power, Groening's response to modern discipline includes thoroughly Nietzschean lightness and laughter. First laying bare in Foucauldian detail the multiple areas of normalizing discipline the average child is subjected to, Groening then adds an indispensable featurehumor.

As Nietzsche says, humor and laughter "kill the spirit of gravity." By introducing satire to his critique, Groening allows for the psychological possibility of distance from, and therefore a sense of control over, the confines of disciplinary power. Groening may not offer ways of overthrowing the normalizing structures instituted in the contemporary classroom, but he does extend to us the opportunity to subvert the pomposity and solemnity of those structures with laughter. Thus, it may be true that the network of relations found in modern disciplinary power are impervious to grand revolutions, Groening might concede to Foucault, but that does not mean that normalizing power must enjoy utter despotic control. For, as Hannah Arendt has said, "The greatest enemy of authority is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter" (45).

Few would uphold Matt Groening as a great intellectual social commentator of our time.10 Yet anyone struck by Foucault's profound analysis of modern Western social institutions may find a similar voice in the cartoons of Matt Groening. However, Groening, unlike Foucault, offers the subjected, disciplined individual the easily accessible tool of humor and parody in acts of subversion that allow the subjected to gain even small degrees of leverage over the confines of modern power. In this way, Groening moves beyond Foucault's limited vision of how the normalized individual might resist in the face of disciplinary control.

In addition, the preceding examination raises reasonable doubt concerning the common intellectual assumption that all contemporary popular entertainment can easily be dismissed as trite and mind-numbing. Anyone familiar with Groening's extensive work may testify to the fact that he consistently produces creatively funny, unexpectedly intelligent humor and subtle social parody. The ingenious application of Foucauldian notions in Groening's various cartoons challenges the prejudice within academic circles that a biting yet thoughtful criticism of contemporary culture never finds its way to the average young television viewer, as well as challenges the thoroughly Platonic assumption that philosophical considerations never touch the lives of the masses.