When Judging Becomes Power: Marching Arts Scoring as a Coercive Intelligence System
- Edward Francis
- Jan 30
- 3 min read
How systems of evaluation create norms, enforce conformity, and produce the very “truths” they claim to measure
by Edward Michael Francis (they/them)
CultFroggy
Marching arts — whether drum corps, winter guard, or indoor ensembles — present themselves as creative fields governed by artistry, athleticism, and expressive interpretation.
Yet beneath the surface of guards, drums, and color wheels lies a system of evaluation that functions like an intelligence apparatus: sensing, interpreting, aggregating, and normalizing signals into a supposedly authoritative hierarchy.
This is not metaphor. This is a mode of power, and the people educated within the system often internalize and reproduce its norms without ever naming how it shapes not only outcomes but subjects — performers, designers, and judges alike.
To understand this, we must turn to scholars who have already mapped the mechanics of similar systems in politics, education, and society writ large.
Power as Regime, Not Force (Michel Foucault)
French philosopher Michel Foucault radically reframed how we think about power. Rather than seeing power as just coercive force applied from above, he showed that power is propagated through knowledge systems, through the production of “truths” that then discipline, normalize, and authorize behavior.
“Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint...” — Foucault on power/knowledge
This is exactly what scoring systems in marching arts do: they don’t coerce by threat of punishment, but by defining what counts as “legitimate performance,” producing that legitimacy through criteria, adjudication language, and annual reinforcements of what is accepted as “true” within the field.
Foucault’s description of disciplinary power was grounded in how modern institutions train subjects to self-monitor and conform — “no theatre, no spectacle, no cruel violence but a more effective subjugation of the soul.”
Normalization Through Judgment
Foucault argues that modern disciplinary power operates through:
Hierarchical observation
Normalizing judgment
Examination
All three are core to structured scoring regimes. Normalizing judgments — ranking, comparing, rating — create a default expectation of what counts as “good.” In the panopticon of marching arts, even uncertainty about being judged conditions behavior.
“Normalizing judgment... makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish….” — Foucault's analysis of disciplinary mechanisms
When designers ask, “Will this read to judges?” they’re not just planning creatively — they are participating in the formation of norms that shape the field. That’s power, not preference.
Field, Habitus, and Cultural Capital (Pierre Bourdieu)
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu provides tools to understand how tastes and capacities aren’t neutral, but are shaped by social structures.
Bourdieu’s concepts of:
Field — a structured social space with its own rules of competition
Habitus — embodied dispositions shaped by experience
Cultural capital — competencies valued and rewarded within a field
… all help explain why scoring systems don’t just evaluate performances — they produce performers whose tastes, behaviors, and creative instincts align with the system’s own logics, making alternatives feel illegible.
Opacity as Power (Frank Pasquale)
Scholar Frank Pasquale has written about how opaque decision-making systems — “black boxes” — shape outcomes while shielding internal logic from scrutiny.
“Black box... a system whose inner workings are secret or unknown.” — Pasquale on algorithms and opaque evaluative systems
In marching arts, scoring rubrics appear to exist, but the interpretive logic behind them often does not. This opacity functions not as a lack, but as a means of legitimating authority by making contest logic feel mystical rather than accountable.
Power, Knowledge, and the Production of Legitimacy
When we stitch these theories together, a pattern emerges:
Evaluation produces categories of legitimacy, not neutral measures.
Participants internalize scoring norms, policing themselves and one another.
Opacity functions as a system feature, not a bug: it shields the internal logic of authority while encouraging conformity.
Judges and adjudicators form a priestly class, their pronouncements taken on authority because they are seen as interpreters of a “complex art.”
Foucault’s discursive practice, Bourdieu’s fields, and Pasquale’s black box institutions all point to one thing: power doesn’t always push through force — it manufactures consent and compliance through the world of meaning itself.
Why This Matters Beyond Marching Arts
This isn’t just about fair or unfair judging. It’s about how systems that claim to measure beauty, skill, art, excellence do so by embedding social norms, power relations, and cultural biases into their core technologies — and then make those norms appear self-evident.
The implications are both creative and political:
Innovation is punished not because it’s bad, but because it’s unreadable within the regime of truth.
Participants police each other because they have internalized the criteria produced by those same systems.
Dissent is framed as naïveté rather than critical insight.
Understanding this transforms chronic frustration into a clear structural diagnosis — paving the way for thinking about transformation, not just critique.
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