Reading journals 3
mercy1997
Foucault_Panopticism_-2059126593.pdf
ALSO BY MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
The Archaeology of Knowledge (and The Discourse on Language)
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and • my brother . ... A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Cen
tury
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The History of Sexuality, Volume I (Volumes II and III to follow)
Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972- 1977
I
FOUC~ Reader
Edited by
Paul Rabinow
Pantheon Books, NewYork
Panopticism
(FROM Discipline and Punish)
... "Discipline" may be identified neither with an instituti?n 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 penitentiarie~ or."houses of correction" of the nineteenth century), or by mstJtut10ns that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by preexisting authorities that find .in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mecharusms of power (one day we should show how intrafamili~~ rela.tio.ns, e~,sentrnlly in the parents-children cell, have become d1sc1plined, ab~orb ing since the classical age external schemata, fJist ~ducatJonal and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the norm~! and the ~bi:iormal), or by apparatuses that have made discipline theJr pn':'c~ple of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of the admm1stratJve appa ratus from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state app~r~tu~es whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that d1sc1plme reigns over society as a whole (the police).
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 indef initely generalizable mechanism of "panopticism." Not because the disciplinary modality of power has repla~ed all the at.hers; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermmmg them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them, and, above all, making it pos-
206
Panopticism · 207
sible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations ....
The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of broad historical processes-economic, juridico political, and, lastly, scientific-of which it forms part.
1. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this: every system of power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfills three criteria: first, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest pos sible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; po litically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); second, 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; third, to link this "economic" growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial, or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. This triple objective of the disciplines corresponds to a well-known histor ical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture was the large demographic thrust of the eighteenth century; an increase in the floating population (one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change of quantitative scale in the groups to be supervised or manipulated (from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eve of the French Revolution, the school population had been increasing rapidly, as had no doubt the hospital population; by the end of the eighteenth century, the peacetime army exceeded 200,000 men). The other aspect of the conjuncture was the growth in the ap paratus of production, which was becoming more and more extended and complex; it was also becoming more costly and its profitability had to be increased. The development of the disciplinary methods corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no doubt, to the new need to adjust their correlation.
208 · Practices and Knowledge
Neither the residual forms of feudal power nor the structures of the administrative monarchy, nor the local mechanisms of supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass they all formed to gether, could carry out this role: they were hindered from doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension of their network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all by the "costly" nature of the power that was exercised in them. It was costly m several senses: because directly it cost a great deal to the treasury; because the system of corrupt offices and farmed-out taxes weighted indirectly, but very heavily, on the population; because the resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle of perpetual reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying (levying on money or products by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical taxation; levying on men or time by corvees of press ganging, by locking up or banishing vagabonds). The devel opment of the disciplines marks the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to a quite different economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of proceeding by deduction, are inte grated into the productive efficiency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this efficiency and into the use of what it produces. For the old principle of "levying-violence," which governed the economy of power, the disciplines substi tute the principle of "mildness-production-profit." These are the 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 destruc tive force in the army).
In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy of power was not suf ficiently equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phe nomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity; reduce what is opposed to the use of each of its elements and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages of number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated dis-
Panopticisrn · 209
tributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counterpower that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dom inate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coali tions-anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. Hence the fact that the disciplines use procedures of partitioning and verticality; that they introduce, between the different ele ments 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 tech mqu~ of the continuous, individualizing pyramid. They must also mcrease the particular utility of each element of the mul tiplicity, but by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multiplicity itself as an in strument of this growth. Hence, it order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those overall methods known as timetables, collective training, exercises, total and de tailed surveillance. Furthermore, the disciplines must increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is in order to increase the utilizable effects of the multiple that the disciplines define tactics of distribution; reciprocal adjustment of bodies, gestures, and rhythms; differentiation of capacities; reaprocal coordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous instruments of power, coextensive with the multiplicity that they regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration, perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a power that is mani fested 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
210 · Practices and Knowledge
decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, most control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a nation, an army or a school, reaches the threshold of a discipline when the relation of the one to the other becomes favorable.
If the economic take-off of the West began with the tech niques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accu mulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, ·calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes-the ac cumulation of men and the accumulation of capital--<:annot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labor, and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close re lations.' Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid con stituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination, and supervision of tasks were imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures, and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modeling of the division of labor following the model laid down by the schemata of power. But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of production, its "mechanical" breaking-down, was projected onto the labor force, whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a "political" force at the least cost and max-
Panopticism · 211
hnized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose 'general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, "political anatomy," could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses, or institutions.
~· The panoptic modality of power-at the elementary, tech mcal, merely physical level at which it is situated-is not under jhe hnmediate dependence or a direct extension of the great :jo.ridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not ·~bsolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the ~?urgeoisie became, in the course of the eighteenth century, the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of rt explicit, coded, and formally egalitarian juridical framework, ade possible by the organization of a parliamentary, repre-
'.~ntative regime. But the development and generalization of isciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these · ocesses. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system f. rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by
hese tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems 'J rnicropower that are essentially nonegalitarian and asym
etrical which we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal ay, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or
,directly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the .ndamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. e real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the
,.,,ma!, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism stituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. ontinued to work in depth on the juridical structures of so
ty, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power func- 'Ji in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. e "Enlightenment," which discovered the liberties, also in- .rited the disciplines. · Jn appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than o.infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined ;faw to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear 'methods of training that enable individuals to become inte-
212 · Practices and Knowledge
grated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be re garded as a sort of counterlaw. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciproci ties. First, because discipline creates between individuals a "pri vate" link, which is a relation of constraints entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another, the "surplus" power that is always fixed on the same side, in inequality of position of the different "partners" in relation to the common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline. We know, for example, how many real procedures undermine the legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is not the least important. Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the dis ciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutionaJ as it may be, the dis cipline, in its mechanism, is a "counterlaw." And, although the universal juridicism of modem society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism en ables 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. The minute disciplines, the panopticisms of everyday, may well be below the level of emer gence of the great apparatuses and the great political struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to which power was redistrib-
Panopticism · 21.3
uted. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that it has invented, and even to those "sci ences" that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of aban doning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mech anisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and every where; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.
To return to the problem of legal punishments, the prison with all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe; at the point where the universal punishments of the law are applied selectively to certain indi viduals and always the same ones; at the point where the re definition of the juridical subject by the penalty becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point where the Jaw is inverted
" and passes outside itself, and where the counterlaw becomes .· the effective and institutionalized content of the juridical forms.
What generalizes the power to punish, then, is not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; it is the regular extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques ....
Notes ."See Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I (1867; New York: Random House, '1977), Chap. XIII; and the very interesting analysis in F. Guerry and
· D. Deleule, Le Corps productif (1973).
