Re: zero-tolerance



On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Fair Housing Center wrote:

> According to this view, it is neither the controllers or the
> controlled, but rather the ONLOOKERS (parents, other students, the community
> in general) who provide the motivating dynamic for the punitive response.
> Forget the petty calculations of the social controllers. Instead, the
> common expression of community outrage at the violation of the "sacred"
> classroom has a spontaneously functional effect: a reaffirmation of respect
> for those power relations that keep the school running. The kids who are
> expelled? They're just scapegoats, sacrifices to the gods of the
> educational machine. They will be re-absorbed by the next apparatus or
> remain safely at the margin.
>
> Coleman
>

I have entered this discussion late due to some of the context provided by
discussions of Marxism, questions about policing (zero tolerance/
repressive apparatuses) basically because I have not been around.

I wrote because I dont understand the final sentence of the post cited
above. I think the whole jist behind the repressive apparatus of zero
tolerance policing is that these students become proletarianized
plebianized. They become classified as more dangerous "dangerous class"
because power has failed in its attempts to categorize and relied on more
oppressive discourses. What will absorb them? Prisons? Cheap labor and
excessive disciplining. (Safe at the margin?) It's possible that "safely
at the margin" refers to the a "civil" or "public" "safeness"? (the penal
system serves society and is thusly good?) but (if I am reading this
correctly) it is certain that the "expelled students" are not "safely
marginalized." What exactly is safe marginalization? When one is
without insitutional support (needle exchange programs, administration of
protease inhibitors) when one is marginalized in what way is this safe?

Also, power is not possessed though it can be exchanged this is made clear
in _Power/Knowledge_ ed. Colin Gordon. There are no "social controllers"
in the sense that I get from the post above. Teachers are "social
controllers" in the sense that they are implicated in the multi-axial
trajectories of power. They express parts of the apparatus and there are
other representational moments that enable teachers to assert a kind of
currency promulgated through positionality, as power.


Rob


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