sociology of law

Foucault Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Vintage Books. Read pages: 200-202 (middle of page), 221 (bottom of page)-224 (top of

page)

Learning goals • What is the “internalization of discipline”? • How do people internalize discipline? • Understand Foucault’s argument that people obey the law because

people have internalized discipline

Intro to Foucault https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVFtc9_AB2k

Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, 'becomes true.' Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, '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 (Foucault 1977,27)

What is the “internalization of discipline”?

The panopticon

What is the “internalization of discipline”? “All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. “

• Why the “madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy”?

What is the “internalization of discipline”? “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents.”

How do people internalize discipline? “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…”

How do people internalize discipline? “Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outine of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so”

“Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.”

How do people internalize discipline?

Are you “normal”?

panopticism is the discipline-mechanism

We obey the law because we have internalized discipline “Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary' rePresentative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these Processes”

We obey the law because we have internalized discipline • 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. • the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of

forces and todies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political Power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion

differences between discipline and the law • In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-

law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demand • Discipline is a relation of constraints entirely different from

contractual obligation

differences between discipline and the law • whereas the juridical systems define iuridical subjects according to

universal norrns, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norrn, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalid • 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