Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

"The Body of the Condemned" (pp. 3-31)

 

From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. (11)

 

It is intended to apply the law not so much to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist. It had to have the abstraction of the law itself. (13)

 

Certainly, the "crimes" and "offences" on which judgement is passed are juridical objects defined by the code, but judgement is also passed on the passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity; acts of aggression are punished, so also, through them, is aggressivity; rape, but at the same time perversions; murders, but also drives and desires [...] which, behind the pretext of explaining an action, are ways of defining an individual. (17-18)

 

By solemnly inscribing offences in the field of objects susceptible to scientific knowledge, they provide the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; not only on what they do, but also on what they are, will be, may be. (18)

 

A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement. Another truth has penetrated the truth that was required by the legal machinery; a truth which, entangled with the first, has turned the assertion of guilt into a strange scientifico-juridical complex. (19)

 

And the practice of calling on psychiatric expertise, which is widespread in the assize courts and sometimes extended to courts of summar jurisdiction, means that the sentence, even if it is always formulated in terms of legal punishment, implies, more or less obscurely, judgements of normality [...] (20)

 

The sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. (20-21)

 

But what is odd about modern criminal justice is that, although it has taken on so many extra-juridical elements, it has done so not in order to be able to define them juridically and gradually to integrate them into the actual power to punish: on the contrary, it has done so in order to make them function within the penal operation as non-juridical elements; in order to stop this operation being simply a legal punishment; in order to exculpate the judge from being purely and simply he who punishes. (22)

 

Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their "repressive" effects alone, on their "punishment" aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects [...] (23)

 

Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising power. (23)

 

Make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and the knoweldge of man. (23)

 

Thus, by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; and in what way a specific model of subjection was abl to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a "scientific" status. (24)

 

We must show that punitive measures are not simply "negative" mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support. (24)

 

It is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated, and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. (26)

 

Moreover, it cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus. For they have recourse to it; they use, select or impose certain of its methods. But, in its mechanisms and its effects, it is situated at a quite different level. What the apparatuses and institutions operate is, in a sense, a micro-physics of power, whose field of calidity is situated in a sense between these great functionings and the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces. (26)

 

One should decipher in it [power] a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess (26)

 

Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the "privilege," acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions -- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. (26-27)

 

It exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. (27)

 

They are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations. (27)

 

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (27)

 

It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge. (28)

 

One would be concerned with the "body politic," as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge. (28)

 

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A "soul" inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (30)

"The Spectacle of the Scaffold" (pp. 32-69)

 

This practice of torture was not an economy of example [...] but a policy of terror: to make everyone aware, thrugh the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. (49)

 

The truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment and [...] it is still to be found in contemporary penal practice. (55)

 

They disappeared as a whole new literature of crime developed: a literature in which crime is glorified, because it is one of the fine arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because villainy is yet another mode of privilege. (68)

 

We are far removed indeed from those accounts of the life and misdeeds of the criminal in which he admitted his crimes, and which recounted in detail the tortures of his execution: we have moved from the exposition of the facts or the confession to the slow process of discovery; from the execution to the investigation; from the physical confrontation to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator. It was not only the broadsheets that disappeared with the birth of a literature of crim; the glory of the rustic malefactor and his sombre transformation into a hero by the process of torture and execution went with them. The man of the people was now too simple to be the protagonist of subtle truths. In this new genre, there were no more popular heroes or great executions; the criminal was wicked, of course, but he was also intelligent; and although he was punished, he did not have to suffer. The literature of crime transposes to another social class the spectacle that had surrounded the criminal. Meanwhile the newspapers took over the task of recounting the grey, unheroic details of everyday crime and punishment. The split was complete; the people was robbed of its old pride in its crimes; the great murders had become the quiet game of the well behaved. (69)

"Generalized Punishment" (pp. 73-103)

 

The true objective of the reform movement, even n its most general formulations, was not so much to establish a new right to punish based on equitable principles, as to set up a new "economy" of the power to punish, to assure its better distribution, so that it should be neither too concentrated at certain privileged points, nor too divided between oposing authorities; so that it should be distributed in homogeneous circuits capable of operating everwhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body. (80)

 

It became necessary to define a strategy and techniques of punishment in which an economy of continuity and permanence would replace that of expenditure and excess. In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities. (87)

 

That is to say, although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intending to administer illegalities diferentially, not to eliminate them all. (89)

 

Thus the criminal appears as a juridically paradoxical being. He has broken the pact, he is therefore the enemy of society as a whole, but he participates in the punishment that is practised upon him. The least crime attacks the whole of society, and the whole of society -- including the criminal -- is present in the least punishment. Penal punishment is therefore a generalized function, coextensive with the function of the social body and with each of its elements. (90)

 

The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereing to the defence of society. (90)

 

Here the principle takes root that one should never apply "inhumane" punishments to a criminal, who, nevertheless, may well be a traitor and a monster. If the law must now treat in a "humane" way an individual who is "outside nature" (whereas the old justice treated the "outlaw" inhumanely), it is not on account of some profound humanity that the criminal conceals within him, but because of a necessary regulation of the effects of power. It is this "economic" rationality that must calculate the penalty and prescribe the appropriate techniques. "Humanity" is the respectable name given to this economy and its meticulous calculations. "Where punishment is concerned, the minimum is ordered by humanity and counselled by policy." (92)

 

Punishment has to make use not of the body, but of representation. Or rather, if it does make use of the body, it is not so much as the subject of a pain as the object of a representation: the memory of pain must prevent a repetition of the crime, just as the spectacle, however artificial it may be, of a physical punishment may prevent the contagion of a crime. But it is not pain in itself that will be the instrument of the technique of punishment. Therefore, as long as possible, and except in cases requiring an effective representation, one should avoid recourse to the great panoply of the scaffold. There is an elision of the body as the subject of the punishment, but not necessarily as an element of the spectacle. (94)

 

The penalty must have its most intense effects on those who have not committed the crime. (95)

 

It is the economically ideal punishment: it is minimal for him who undergoes it (and who, reduced to slavery, cannot repeat his crime) and it is maximal for him who represents it to himself. (95)

 

Hence the idea that the machinery of justice must be duplicated by an organ of surveillance that would work side by side with it, and which would make it possible either to prevent crimes, or, if committed, to arrest their authors; police and justice must work together as two complementary actions of the same process. (96)

 

Criminality, rather than the crime, became the object of penal intervention. (100)

 

But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by this term: the correlative of a technique of power. (101)

 

From this there emerge two lines of objectification of crime and of the criminal. On the one hand, the criminal designated as the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down, falls outside the pact, disqualifies himself as a citizen and emerges, bearing within him as it were, a wild fragment of nature; he appears as a villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, "abnormal" individual. It is as such that, one day, he will belong to a scientific objectification and to the "treatment" that is correlative to it. On the other hand, the need to measure, from within, the effects of the punitive power prescribes tactics of intervention over all criminals, actual or potential: the organization of a field of prevention, the calculation of interests, the circulation of representations and signs, the constitution of a horizon of certainty and proof, the adjustment of penalties to ever more subtle variables; all this also leads to an objectification of criminals and crimes. In either case, one sees that the power relation that underlies the exercise of punishment begins to be duplicated by an object relation in which are caught up not only the crime as a fact to be established according to common norms, but the criminal as an individual to be known according to specific criteria. (101-2)

"The Gentle Way in Punishment" (pp. 104-131)

 

For the convict, the penalty is a mechanics of signs, interests and duration. But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty. (108)

 

Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate? It would be more useful to make him "serve the state in a slavery that would be more or less extended according to the nature of his crime." (109)

 

In the penalty, rather than seeing the presence of the sovereign, one will read the laws themselves. (110)

 

The punishment must be a school rather than a festival. (111)

 

The positive mechanics will operate to the full in the language of every da, which will constantly reinforce it with new accounts. Discourse will become the vehicle of the law: the constant principle of universal recoding. (112)

 

The criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is the parricide. (114)

 

Prison as the universal penalty is incompatible with this whole technique of penalty-effect, penalty-representation, penalty-general function, penalty-sign and discourse. (114-5)

 

It would create a mass of new workers, which would help "by competition to bring down the cost of labour." (121)

 

The duration of the penalty has meaning only in relation to possible correction, and to an economic use of the corrected criminal. (122)

 

Solitary work would then become not only an apprenticeship, but also an exercise in spiritual conversion; it would rearrange not only the complex of interests proper to homo oeconomicus, but also the imperatives of the moral subject. (123)

 

They are processes that effect a transformation of the individual as a whole -- of his bod and of his habits by the daily work that he is forced to perform, of his mind and his will by the spiritual attentions that are paid to him. (125)

 

The prison, though an administrative apparatus, will at the same time be a machine for altering minds. (125)

 

But no doubt the most important thing was that this control and transformation of behaviour were accompanied -- both as a condition and as a consequence -- by the development of a knowledge of the individuals. (125)

 

A whole corpus of individualizing knowledge was being organized that took as its field of reference not so much the crime committed (at least in isolation), but the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and which is manifested in his observed everyday conduct. The prison functions in this as an apparatus of knowledge. (126)

 

One punishes not to efface the crime, but to transform the criminal (actual or potential); punishment must bring with it a certain corrective technique. (127)

 

And, ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but 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. There are two quite distinct ways, therefore, of reacting to the offence: one may restore the juridical subject of the social pact, or shape an obedient subject, according to the general and detailed form of some power. (129)

 

A power to punish that ran the whole length of the social network would act at each of its points, and in the end would no longer be perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual. (120)

 

Broadly speaking, one might say that, in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty [...] The reforming jurists, on the other hand, saw punishment as a procedure for requalifying individuals as subjects, as juridical subjects [...] Lastly, in the project for a prison institution that was then developing, punishment was seen as a technique for the coercion of individualsl; it operated methods of training the body -- not signs -- by the traces it leaves, in the form of habits, in behaviour; and it presupposed the setting up of a specific power for the administration of the penalty. (130-1)

"Docile Bodies" (pp. 135-169)

 

The classical age discovered the body as an object and target of power. (136)

 

However, there were several new things in these techniques. To begin with, there was the scale of the control: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, "wholesale," as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it "retail," individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself -- movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body. Then there was the object of control: it was not or was no longer the signifying elements of behaviour or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization; constraint bears upon the forces rather than upon the signs; the only truly important ceremony is that of exercise. Lastly, there is the modality: it implies an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement. These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called "disciplines." (136-7)

 

The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. (137-8)

 

The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A "political anatomy," which was also a "mechanics of power," was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, "docile" bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an "aptitude," a "capacity," which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. (138)

 

Discipline is a political anatomy of detail. (139)

 

A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born. (141)

 

I shall take examples from military, medical, educational and industrial institutions. Other examples might have been taken from colonization, slavery and child rearing. (314 n1)

 

In the first instance, discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space. (141)

 

Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. (141)

 

The principle of "enclosure" is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary machinery. This machinery works space in a much more flexible and detailed way. It does this first of all on the principle of elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. [...] Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervice the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. (143)

 

Particular places were defined to correspond not only to the need to supervise, to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space. (143-4)

 

In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the place it occupies in a series, and by the gap that separates it from the others. The unit is, therefore, neither the territory (unit of domination), nor the place (unit of residence), but the rank: the place one occupies in a classification, the point at which a line and a column intersect, the interval in a series of intervals that one may traverse one after the other. Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations. (145-6)

 

In the eighteenth century, the table was both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge. It was a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument to cover it and to master it; it was a question of imposing upon it an "order." (148)

 

We have passed from a form of injunction that measured or punctuated gestures to a web that constrains them or sustains them throughout their entire succession. A sort of anatomo-chronological shema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. (152)

 

Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labour. The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the operation. Thus disciplinary power appears to have the function not so much of a deduction as of synthesis, not so much of exploitation of the product as of coercive link with the apparatus of production. (153)

 

Discipline, on the other hand, arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. (154)

 

The body, required to be docile in its minutest operations, opposes and shows the conditions of functioning proper to an organism. Disciplinary power has as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and "cellular," but also natural and "organic." (156)

 

A whole analytical pedagogy was being formed, meticulous in its detail (it broke down the subject being taught into its simplest elements, it hierarchized each stage of development into small steps) and also very precocious in its history (it largely anticipated the genetic analyses of the ideologues, whose technical model it appears to have been). (159)

 

The 'seriation' of successive activities makes possible a whole investment of duration by power: the possibility of a detailed control and a regular intervention (of differentiation, correction, punishment, elimination) in each moment of time; the possibility of accumulating time and activity, of rediscovering them, totalized and usable in a final result, which is the ultimate capacity of an individual. Temporal dispersal is brought together to produce a profit, thus mastering a duration that would otherwise elude one's grasp. Power is articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees its use. (160)

 

A macro- and micro-physics of power made possible, not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that), but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of dominations. (160)

 

Perhaps it was these procedures of community life and salvation that were the first nucleus of methods intended to produce individually characterized, but collectively useful aptitudes. (162)

 

It was gradually, in the history of the West, to change direction while preserving certain of its characteristics; it served to economize the time of life, to accumulate it in a useful form and to exercise power over men through the mediation of time arranged in this way. (162)

 

Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine. (164)

 

To sum up, it might be said that discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality, or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular (by the play of spatial distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities), it is genetic (by the accumulation of time), it is combinatory (by the composition of forces). (167)

"The Means of Correct Training" (pp. 170-194)

 

 

It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them. Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units. It "trains" the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements -- small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline "makes" individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. (170)

 

At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism. (177)

 

The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body ("incorrect" attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). (178)

 

It was a question both of making the slightest departures from correct behaviour subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus: so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject find himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality. (178)

 

Through this micro-economy of a perpetual penalty operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value. By assessing acts with precision, discipline judges individuals "in truth"; the penalty that it implements is integrated into the cycle of knowledge of individuals. (181)

 

The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. (183)

 

The minor court that seems to sit permanently in the buildings of discipline, and which sometimes assumes the theatrical form of the great legal apparatus, must not mislead us: it does not bring, except for a few formal remnants, the mechanisms of criminal justice to the web of everyday existence; or at leat that is not its essential role; the disciplines created -- drawing on a whole series of very ancient procedures -- a new functioning of punishment, and it was this that gradually invested the great external apparatus that it seemed to reproduce in either a modest or an ironic way. The juridico-anthropological functioning revealed in the whole history of modern penality did not originate in the superimposition of the human sciences on criminal justice and in the requirements proper to this new rationality or to the humanism that it appeared to bring with it; it originated in the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgement. (183)

 

For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced -- or at least supplemented -- by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank. In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. (184)

 

The examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power. (187)

 

Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. (187)

 

In it the "subjects" were presented as "objects" to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze. They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects -- in replica, as it were -- on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile. (188)

 

The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation. (189)

 

Hence the formation of a whole series of codes of disciplinary individuality that made it possible to transcribe, by means of homogenization the individual features established by the examination: the physical code of signalling, the medical code of symptoms, the educational or military code of conduct or performance. These codes were still very crude, both in quality and quantity, but they marked a first stage in the "formalization" of the individual within power relations. (190)

 

Thanks to the whole apparatus of writing that accompanied it, the examination opened up two correlative possibilities: firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object, not in order to reduce him to "specific" features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge; and, secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given "popularity." (190)

 

One is no doubt right to pose the Aristotelean problem: is a science of the individual possible and legitimate? A great problem needs great solutions perhaps. But there is the small historical problems of the emergence, toward the end of the eighteenth century, of what might generally be termed the "clinical" sciences; the problem of the entry of the individual (and no longer the species) into the field of knowledge; the problem of the entry of the individual description, of the cross-examination, of anamnesis, of the "file" into the general functioning of scientific discourse. (191)

 

The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a "case": a case which at one and the same time constitutes an objects for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power. The case [...] is the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc. (191)

 

This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heoization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection. (192)

 

Finally, the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge. (192)

 

In a disciplinary regime, on the other hand, individualization is "descending"; as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have the "norm" as reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference; by "gaps" rather than by deeds. In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs that all the individualizing mechanisms are turned in our civilization; and when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing. All the sciences analyses or practices employing the root "psycho-" have their origin in this historical reversal of the procedures of individualization. (193)

 

And if from the early Middle Ages to the present day the "adventure" is an account of individuality, the passage from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the internal search for childhood, from combats to phantasies, it is also inscribed in the formation of a disciplinary society. (193)

 

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals." In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge may be gained of him belong to this production. (194)

"Panopticism" (pp. 195-230)

 

Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. (197)

 

Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). (199)

 

The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms which they distantly derive. (199-200)

 

Each individual [...] is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject of communication. (200)

 

The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. (201)

 

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. (201)

 

The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power. (202)

 

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (202-203)

 

Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised. (204)

 

The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. (205)

 

But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. (205)

 

It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. (205)

 

The Panopticon [...] has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces -- to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply. (208)

 

The domain of panopticism is [...] that whole lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; what are required are mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations. (208)

 

Panopticism is the general principle of a new "political anatomy" whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline. (208)

 

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. (209)

 

Now [the disciplines] were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. (210)

 

The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. (211)

 

It would be wrong to believe that the disciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for all by a state apparatus. (215)

 

"Discipline" may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy" of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by "specialized" institutions (the penitentiaries or "houses of correction" of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power. (215)

 

On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social "quarantine," to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of "panopticism". (216)

 

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. (217)

 

The peculiarities of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost [/<raw>...]; secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this "economic" growth of power with the output of the apparatuses <raw>[...] within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. (218)

 

These are techniques that make it possible to adjust the multiplicity of men and the multiplication of the apparatuses of production (and this means not only "production" in the strict sense, but also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructive force in the army). (219)

 

The effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions -- anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. Hence the fact that the discipline use procedures of partitioning and verticality, that they introduce, between the different elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define compact hierarchical networks, in short, that they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continuous, individualizing pyramid. (220)

 

The disciplines must increase the effects of utility proper to multiplicities, so that each is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements. (220)

 

In short, to substitute for a power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disciplines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it possible to increase the useful size of multiplicities by decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, must control them. (220)

 

The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power. (221)

 

The panoptic modality of power [...] is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent. (222)

 

The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. (222)

 

The "Enlightenment," which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (222)

 

In appearance, the disciplines constitute more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives. (222)

 

The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. (222)

 

Whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. (223)

 

Although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. (223)

 

The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the juridical duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. (225)

 

But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline [...]. The great investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its political-juridical model; the examination, on the other hand, is still caught up in disciplinary technology. (227)

 

The ideal point of penalty today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptomatic movement that strives to meet in infinity. (227)

"Complete and Austere Institutions" (pp. 231-256)

 

The general form of an apparatus intended to render individuals docile and useful, by means of precise work upon their bodies, indicated the prison institution, before the law ever defined it as the penalty par excellence. (231)

 

How could the prison not be immediately accepted when, by locking up, retaining and rendering docile, it merely reproduces, with a little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the social body? (233)

 

The prison should not be seen as an inert institution, shaken at intervals by reform movements. The "theory of the prison" was its constant set of operational instructions rather than its incidental criticism -- one of its conditions of functioning. (235)

 

The prison must be the microcosm of a perfect society in which individuals are isolated in their moral existence, but in which they come together in a strict hierarchical framework, with no lateral relation, communication being possible only in a vertical direction. (238)

 

It is intrinsically useful, not as an activity of production, but by virtue of the effect it has on the human mechanism. It is a principle of order and regularity; through the demands that it imposes, it conveys, imperceptibly, the forms of a rigorous power; it bends bodies to regular movements, it excludes agitation and distraction, it imposes a hierarchy and a surveillance that are all the more accepted, and which will be inscribed all the more deeply in the behaviour of the convicts, in that they form part of its logic. (242)

 

If, in the final analysis, the work of the prison has an economic effect, it is by producing individuals mechanized according to the general norms of an industrial society. (242)

 

The labour by which the convict contributes to his own needs turns the thief into a docile worker. This is the utility of remuneration for penal labour; it imposes on the convict the "moral" form of wages as the condition of his existence. (243)

 

The wages of the penal labour do not reward production; they function as a motive and measure of individual transformation: it is a legal fiction, since it does not represent the "free" granting of labour power, but an artifice that is presumed to be effective in the techniques of correction. (243)

 

It is as a convict, as a point of application for punitive mechanisms, that the offender is constituted himself as the object of possible knowledge. (251)

 

The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. (251)

 

At the point that marks the disappearance of the branded, dismembered, burnt, annihilated body of the tortured criminal, there appeared the body of the prisoner, duplicated by the individuality of the "delinquent," by the little soul of the criminal, which the very apparatus of punishment fabricated as a point of application of the power to punish and as the object of what is still called today penitentiary science. It is said that the prison fabricated delinquents; it is true that it brings back, almost inevitably, before the courts those who have been sent there. But it also fabricates them in the sense that it has introduced into the operation of the law and the offence, the judge and the offender, the condemned man and the executioner, the non-corporeal reality of the delinquency that links them together and, for a century and a half, has caught them in the same trap. (254-5)

 

That the grip of the prison on the penal system should not have led to a violent reaction of rejection is no doubt due to many reasons. One of these is that, in fabricating delinquency, it gave to criminal justice a unitary field of objects, authenticated by the "sciences," and thus enabled it to function on a general horizon of "truth." (256)

"Illegalities and Delinquency" (pp. 257-292)

 

One must not, therefore, regard the prison, its "failure" and its more or less successful reform as three successive stages. One should think rather of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty; a fourfold system comprising: the additional, disciplinary element of the prison -- the element of "super-power"; the production of an objectivity, a technique, a penitentiary "rationality" -- the element of auxiliary knowledge; the de facto reintroduction, if not actual increase, of a criminality that the prison ought to destroy -- the element of inverted efficiency; lastly, the repetition of a "reform" that is isomorphic, despite its "idealism," with the disciplinary functioning of the prison -- the element of utopian duplication. It is this complex ensemble that constitutes the "carceral system". (271)

 

Can we not see here a consequence rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection. (272)

 

In short, penalty does not simply "check" illegalities; it "differentiates" them, it provides them with a general "economy." (272)

 

One should not see in delinquency the most intense, most harmful form of illegality, the form that the penal apparatus must try to eliminate through imprisonment because of the danger it represents; it is rather an effect of penality (and of the penality of detention) that makes it possible to differentiate, accomodate and supervise illegalities. (277)

 

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency. (277)

 

Delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups. (279)

 

The existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency. This organization is an instrument for administering and exploiting illegalities. (280)

 

In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency. This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but it also becomes a part and an instrument of it. So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison. (282)

"The Carceral" (pp. 293-308)

 

At the center of [the carceral] city, and as if to hold it in place, there is, not the "centre of power," not a network of forces, but a multiple network of diverse elements -- walls, space, institution, rules, discourse; that the model of the carceral city is not, therefore, the body of the king, with the powers that emenate from it, nor the contractual meeting of wills from which a body that was both individual and collective was born, but a strategic distribution of elements of different natures and levels. (307)

 

These mechanisms are applied not to transgressions against a "central" law, but to the apparatus of productin -- "commerce" and "industry" -- to a whole multiplicity of illegalities, in all their diversity of nature and origin, their specific role in profit and the different ways in which they are dealt with by the punitive mechanisms. (308)

 

In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of "incarceration," objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle. (308)