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Michel Foucault

D I S C I P L I N E A ND P U N I S H The Birth o f the Prison

T ran slated from the French

by A la n S h e r id a n

V I N T A G E B O O K S

A D I V I S I O N O F R A N D O M H O U S E , I N C . N E W Y O R K

3 * Panopticism

T h e following, according to an order published at the end o f the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a to w n .1

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing o f the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain o f death, the killing o f all stray animals; the division o f the town into distinct quarters, each governed b y an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority o f a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. O n the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain o f death. T h e syndic himself comes to lock the door o f each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant o f the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end o f the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up )between the street and the interior o f the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the sup­ pliers and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. I f it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. O n ly the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the ‘cro w s’ , w ho can be left to die: these are ‘ people o f little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices’ . It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. A n d , i f he moves, he does so at the risk o f his life, contagion or punishment.

Inspection functions ceaselessly. T h e gaze is alert everywhere: ‘ A considerable bod y o f militia, commanded b y good officers and men

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o f substance’ , guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience o f the people and the most absolute authority o f the magistrates, ‘as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion’. A t each o f the town gates there will be an observation post; at the end o f each street sentinels. E v e r y day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they ‘ observe their actions’ . E v e r y day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the w indow s (those w ho live overlooking the courtyard will be allo­ cated a w indow looking onto the street at which no one but they m ay show themselves); he calls each o f them b y name; informs himself as to the state o f each and every one o f them - ‘ in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain o f death’ ; i f someone does not appear at the w in dow , the syndic must ask w h y: ‘In this w a y he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.1 Everyon e locked up in his cage, everyone at his w indow , answering to his name and showing himself when asked - it is the great review o f the living and the dead.

T h is surveillance is based on a system o f permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor. A t the beginning o f the ‘ lock up’ , the role o f each o f the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one b y one; this document bears ‘ the name, age, sex o f everyone, notwith­ standing his condition': a c o p y is sent to the intendant o f the quarter, another to the office o f the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. E veryth in g that m ay be observed during the course o f the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities - is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. T h e magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner m ay treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note ‘ to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick o f the contagion, unknown to the magistrates’ . T h e registration o f the pathological must be constantly centralized. T h e relation o f each individual to his

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disease and to his death passes through the representatives o f power, the registration they make o f it, the decisions they take on it.

F iv e or six days after the beginning o f the quarantine, the process o f purifyin g the houses one b y one is begun. A ll the inhabitants are made to leave; in each room 'the furniture and goods’ are raised from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those w ho have carried out the w o rk are searched, as they were on entry, ‘ in the presence o f the residents o f the house, to see that they did not have something on their persons as they left that they did not have on entering’ . F o u r hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes.

T h is enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted w ork o f w riting links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is con­ stantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model o f the disciplinary mechanism. T h e plague is met b y order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that o f the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that o f the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcom e prohibitions. It lays dow n for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his w ell-being, b y means o f an omnipresent and omniscient pow er that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted w a y even to the ultimate determination o f the individual, o f what characterizes him, o f what belongs to him, o f what happens to him. A gainst the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one o f analysis. A whole literary fiction o f the festival g rew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy o f passing time, bodies m ingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream o f the

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plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration o f regulation into even the smallest details o f everyd ay life through the mediation o f the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary func­ tioning o f power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual o f his ‘ true* name, his ‘ true* place, his <true, body, his ‘ true’ disease. T h e plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, o f disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory o f ‘ contagions', o f the plague, o f rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people w ho appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.

I f it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals o f exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form o f the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary pro- jects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set o f people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth o f surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification o f power. T h e leper was caught up in a practice o f rejection, o f exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick o f the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partition­ ing in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects o f a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. T h e leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. T h e first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. T h e exile o f the leper and the arrest o f the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. T h e first is that o f a pure community, the second that o f a disciplined society. T w o w ays o f exercising pow er over men, o f controlling their relations, o f separating out their dangerous mixtures. T h e plague-stricken town, traversed through­ out with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, w riting; the town immobilized b y the functioning o f an extensive power that bears in a distinct w a y over all individual bodies - this is the utopia o f the perfectly governed city. T h e plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course o f which one m ay define ideally the exercise o f disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws

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function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state o f nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt o f the state o f plague. U nderlying dis­ ciplinary projects the image o f the plague stands for all forms o f confusion and disorder; just as the image o f the leper, cut o ff from all human contact, underlies projects o f exclusion.

T h e y are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. W e see them com ing slow ly together, and it is the peculiarity o f the nineteenth century that it applied to the space o f exclusion o f which the leper was the sym bolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique o f power proper to disciplinary partitioning. T reat ‘ lepers’ as ‘plague victim s’ , project the subtle segmentations o f discipline onto the confused space o f internment, combine it with the methods o f analy­ tical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures o f individualization to mark exclusion - this is what Was operated regularly b y disciplinary pow er from the beginning o f the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that o f binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerpus/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that o f coercive assignment, o f differential distribution (w ho he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; h ow he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual w a y , etc.). O n the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics o f individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality o f disci­ plinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘ leper’ and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms o f exclusion. T h e constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, b y applying the binary branding and exile o f the leper to quite different objects; the existence o f a whole set o f techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear o f the plague gave rise. A ll the mechanisms o f pow er which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter

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him, are composed o f those two forms from which they distantly derive.

Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure o f this composi­ tion. W e know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side o f the ring; the peri­ pheric building is divided into cells, each o f which extends the whole width o f the building; they have two w in dow s, one on the inside, corresponding to the w in dow s o f the tower; the other, on the out­ side, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. A ll 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 w orker or a schoolboy. B y the effect o f backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells o f the periphery. T h e y are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible- T h e panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see con­ stantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the prin­ ciple o f the dungeon; or rather o f its three functions - to enclose, to deprive o f light and to hide - it preserves only the first and elimin­ ates the other two. Full lighting and the eye o f a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. V isibility is a trap.

T o begin with, this made it possible - as a negative effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places o f confinement, those painted b y G o y a or described b y H oward. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front b y the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his compan­ ions. H e is seen, but he does not see; he is the object o f information, never a subject in communication. T h e arrangement o f his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions o f the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. A n d this invisibility is a guarantee o f order. I f the in­ mates are convicts, there is no danger o f a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning o f new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; i f they are patients, there is no danger o f

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contagion; i f they are madmen there is no risk o f their committing violence upon one another; i f they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste o f time; i f they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none o f those dis­ tractions that slow dow n the rate o f w ork , make it less perfect or cause accidents. T h e crow d, a compact mass, a locus o f multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced b y a collection o f separated individualities. From the point o f view o f the guardian, it is replaced b y a multipli­ city that can be numbered and supervised; from the point o f vie w o f the inmates, b y a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64).

Hence the major effect o f the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state o f conscious and permanent visibility that assures the auto­ matic functioning o f power. So to arrange things that the surveil­ lance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection o f 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 o f the person w h o exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation o f which they are themselves the bearers. T o achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed b y an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact o f being so. In vie w o f this, Bentham laid down the p rin c ip le that power should be visible and unveri- fiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline o f the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never k n ow whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may alw ays be so. In order to make the presence or absence o f the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only V e n etian blinds on the windows o f the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam o f light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence o f the guardian.2 T h e Panopticon is a

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machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the periph­ eric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.3

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindivi- dualizes power. 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. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign's surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequili­ brium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence o f the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity o f the indiscreet, the malice o f a child, the thirst for knowledge o f a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum o f human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate o f being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness o f being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects o f power.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to w o rk , the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation o f the regulations. Bentham w as surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. T h e heaviness o f the old ‘ houses o f security’ , with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced b y the simple, economic geometry o f a ‘ house o f certainty’ . T h e efficiency o f pow er, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side o f its surface o f application. He who is subjected to a field o f visibility, and w ho knows it, assumes responsi­ bility for the constraints o f power; he makes them play spontane­ ously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the pow er relation in

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which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle o f his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

Bentham does not say whether he was inspired, in his project, by Le Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles: the first menagerie in which the different elements are not, as they traditionally were, distributed in a park (Loisel, 104-7). At the centre was an octagonal pavilion which, on the first floor, consisted o f only a single room, the king’s salon; on every side large windows looked out onto seven cages (the eighth side was. reserved for the entrance), containing different species o f animals. By Bentham’s time, this menagerie had dis­ appeared. But one finds in the programme o f the Panopticon a similar concern with individualizing observation, with characteriza­ tion and classification, with the analytical arrangement o f space. The Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man, individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the machinery o f a furtive power. With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work o f a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms o f each indivi­ dual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation o f miasmas, the effects o f contagion confusing the clinical tables; among school­ children, it makes it possible to observe performances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to normal development, to distinguish ‘laziness and stubbornness’ from ‘ incurable imbecility*; among workers, it makes it possible to note the aptitudes o f each worker, compare the time he takes to perform a task, and if they are paid by the day, to calculate their wages (Bentham, 60-64).

So much for the question o f observation. But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experi­ ments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experi­ ment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques

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simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. T o try out pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem o f secluded education, b y using orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their six­ teenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would follow ‘ the genealogy o f every observable idea’ ; one could bring up different children according to different systems o f thought, making certain children believe that tw o and tw o do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one w ould have at least an opportunity o f making discoveries in the domain o f metaphysics. T h e Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that m ay be obtained from them. T h e Panopticon m ay even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director m ay spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, w a r­ ders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their be­ haviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself. A n inspector arriving unexpectedly at the centre o f the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the entire establishment is functioning. A n d , in any case, enclosed as he is in the middle o f this architectural mechanism, is not the director’ s own fate entirely bound up with it? T h e incompetent physician w ho has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims o f an epidemic or a r e v o lt .4 “ B y every tie I could devise” , said the master o f the Panopticon, “ m y ow n fate had been bound up b y me with theirs” ’ (Bentham, 1 7 7 ). T h e Panopticon functions as a kind o f laboratory o f power. Thanks to its mechanisms o f observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’ s beha­ viour; knowledge follows the advances o f power, discovering new objects o f knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.

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T h e plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment - the differences are important. T h e y mark, at a distance o f a century and a half, the transformations o f the disciplinary programme. In the first case, there is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary evil, pow er is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible; it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is reduced, in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple dualism o f life and death: that which moves brings death, and one kills that which moves. T h e Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model o f functioning; a w a y o f defining power relations in terms o f the everyd ay life o f men. N o doubt Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough. A s opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms o f torture, to be seen in Piranese’ s engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. T h e fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence o f the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost tw o hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram o f a mechanism o f power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure archi­ tectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure o f political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to w ork . It is a type o f location o f bodies in space, o f distribution o f individuals in relation to one another, o f hierarchical organization, o f disposi­ tion o f centres and channels o f power, o f definition o f the instru­ ments and modes o f intervention o f power, which can be implemen­ ted in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. W henever one is dealing with a multiplicity o f individuals on whom a task or a particular form o f behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema m ay be used. It is - necessary modifications apart - applicable ‘ to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large

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to be covered or commanded b y buildings, a number o f persons are meant to be kept under inspection’ (Bentham, 40; although Bentham takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is because it has many different functions to fulfil — safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour and instruction).

In each o f its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exer­ cise o f power. It does this in several w ays: because it can reduce the number o f those w ho exercise it, while increasing the number o f those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘ pow er o f mind over m ind\ T h e panoptic schema makes any apparatus o f power more intense: it assures its econom y (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity b y its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a w a y o f obtaining from pow er ‘ in hitherto unexampled quantity*, ‘ a great and new instrument o f government . . . ; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable o f givin g to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to’ (Bentham, 66).

I t ’ s a case o f ‘ it’ s easy once y o u ’ve thought o f it* in the political sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect o f this function, b y being linked closely with it; it can consti­ tute a mixed mechanism in which relations o f power (and o f k now ­ ledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the pro­ cesses that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between ‘surplus pow er5 and ‘ surplus production’ . In short, it arranges things in such a w a y that the exercise o f power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency b y itself increasing its own points o f contact. T h e panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point o f exchange between a mechanism o f pow er and a function; it is a w a y o f making

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pow er relations function in a function, and o f making a function function through these pow er relations. Bentham’ s Preface to Panopticon opens with a list o f the benefits to be obtained from his ‘inspection-house’ : ‘Morals reformed — health preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—E c o n o m y seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot o f the P o o r -L a w s not cut, but untied - all b y a simple idea in architecture!1 (Bentham,

39)- Furthermore, the arrangement o f this machine is such that its

enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have seen that anyone m ay come and exercise in the cen­ tral tower the functions o f surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a clear idea o f the w a y in which the surveillance is practised. In fact, any panoptic institution, even i f it is as rigorously closed as a penitentiary, m ay without difficulty be subjected to such irregu­ lar and constant inspections: and not only b y the appointed inspec­ tors, but also b y the public; any member o f society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes h o w the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the increase o f pow er created b y the panoptic machine m ay degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘ to the great tribunal committee o f the w o rld ’ . 4 T h is Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer m ay observe, at a glance, so jnany different individuals, also enables everyone to come and observe any o f the observers. T h e seeing machine was once a sort o f dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise o f pow er m ay be supervised b y society as a whole.

T h e panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any o f its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social b o d y; its vocation was to become a generalized function. T h e plague- stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death, pow er opposed its perpetual threat o f death; life inside it was reduced to its simplest expression; it was, against the pow er o f death, the meti­ culous exercise o f the right o f the sword. T h e Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role o f amplification; although it arranges pow er, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective,

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it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation o f a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the econom y, spread education, raise the level o f public morality; to increase and multiply.

H o w is power to be strengthened in such a w a y that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? W h at intensificator o f power will be able at the same time to be a multiplica tor o f pro­ duction? H o w will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those o f society instead o f confiscating them or impeding them? T h e Panopticon’s solution to this problem is that the productive increase o f power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the ve ry foundations o f society, in the subtlest possible w a y , and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise o f sovereignty. T h e body o f the king, w ith its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme o f this new physics o f power represented b y panopticism; the domain o f panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region o f irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; w hat are required are mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combina­ tions, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics o f a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person o f the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized b y these relations. A t the theoretical level, Bentham defines another w a y o f analysing the social body and the pow er relations that traverse it; in terms o f practice, he defines a procedure o f subordination o f bodies and forces that must increase the utility o f power while practising the econom y o f the prince. Panopticism is the general principle o f a new ‘ political anatomy* whose object and end are not the relations o f sovereignty but the relations o f discipline.

T h e celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high tower, powerful and know ing, m ay have been for Bentham a project o f a perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one m ay ‘ unlock’ the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused,

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multiple, polyvalent w a y throughout the whole social body. These disciplines, which the classical age had elaborated in specific, relatively enclosed places - barracks, schools, workshops - and whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and temporary scale o f a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt o f transforming into a network o f mechanisms that would be e ve ry­ where and alw ays alert, running through society without interrup­ tion in space or in time. T h e panoptic arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. It programmes, at the level o f an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning o f a society penetrated through and through w ith disciplinary mechanisms.

There are two images, then, o f discipline. A t one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges o f society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. A t the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise o f pow er b y making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design o f subtle coercion for a society to come. T h e movement from one project to the other, from a schema o f exceptional discipline to one o f a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension o f the mechanisms o f discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social bo d y, the formation o f what might be called in general the disciplinary society.

A whole disciplinary generalization - the Benthamite physics o f power represents an acknowledgement o f this - had operated throughout the classical age. T h e spread o f disciplinary institutions, whose network was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and occupying above all a less and less marginal position, testifies to this: what was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure, or a singular model, became a general formula; the regulations characteristic o f the Protestant and pious armies o f W illiam o f Orange or o f Gustavus Adolphus were transformed into regulations for all the armies o f Europe; the model colleges o f the Jesuits, or the schools o f Batencour or Dem ia, follow ing the example set b y Sturm ,

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provided the outlines for the general forms of educational dis­ cipline; the ordering o f the naval and military hospitals provided the model for the entire reorganization o f hospitals in the eighteenth century.

But this extension o f the disciplinary institutions was no doubt only the most visible aspect o f various, more profound processes.

i. The functional inversion o f the disciplines. At first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed popula­ tions, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becom­ ing able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. Military discipline is no longer a mere means o f preventing looting, desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become a basic technique to enable the army to exist, not as an assembled crowd, but as a unity that derives from this very unity an increase in its forces; discipline increases the skill o f each individual, co­ ordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts o f attack without reducing their vigour, in- creases the capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the work­ shop, while remaining a way o f enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, o f preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in terms o f their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy. When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance o f their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up, they are unable to communicate a sound upbringing that they themselves never had’; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance o f God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny, brigandage); and the formation o f those gangs of beggars, always ready to stir up public disorder and ‘virtually to exhaust the funds o f the Hotel-Dieu* (Demia, 60-61). Now, at the beginning of the Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to ‘fortify*, to ‘develop the body’ , to prepare

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the child ‘for a future in some mechanical work’ , to give him ‘an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits’ (Talleyrand’s Report to the Constituent Assembly, 10 September 1791, quoted by Leon, 106). The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow loosening o f their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and most productive sectors o f society. They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission o f knowledge, the diffusion o f aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary insti­ tutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses.

2. The swarming o f disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a* certain tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role o f external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin o f lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way o f life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The school tends to constitute minute social observatories that penetrate even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the bad behaviour o f the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext, according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbours, especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, to find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers, whether they are determined to root out the vices o f their children, how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrange­ ments are; the visit may end with the giving o f alms, the present o f a religious picture, or the provision o f additional beds (Demia, 39-40).

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Sim ilarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived o f as a base for the medical observation o f the population outside; after the burning dow n o f the H otel-D ieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced b y a series o f smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in the sick o f the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed o f the sanitary state o f the region.5

O ne also sees the spread o f disciplinary procedures, not in the form o f enclosed institutions, but as centres o f observation dis­ seminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long played this role o f ‘disciplining* the popula­ tion. From the Counter-Reform ation to the philanthropy o f the Ju ly monarchy, initiatives o f this type continued to increase; their aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to w ork) or political (the struggle against dis­ content or agitation). One has only to cite b y w ay o f example the regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. T h e territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and the members o f the associations divided themselves up along the same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas regularly, lT h e y will strive to eradicate places o f ill-repute, tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy, im­ piety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.* T h e y will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the information to be obtained is laid dow n in regulations: the stability o f the lodging, knowledge o f prayers, attendance at the sacraments, knowledge o f a trade, morality (and ‘whether they have not fallen into poverty through their own fault*); lastly, ‘ one must learn b y skilful questioning in what w a y they behave at home. W hether there is peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are care­ ful to bring up their children in the fear o f G od . . . whether they do not have their older children o f different sexes sleeping together and w ith them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery in their families, especially in their older daughters. I f one has any doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their marriage certificate*.5

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3. The state-control o f the mechanisms o f discipline. In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions o f social discipline (cf, Radzinovitz, 203-14); in France, although a part o f this role remained in the hands o f parish guilds or charity associations, another - and no doubt the most important part - was very soon taken over by the police apparatus.

The organization o f a centralized police had long been regarded, even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression of royal absolutism; the sovereign had wished to have ‘his own magistrate to whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, inten­ tions, and who was entrusted with the execution o f orders and orders under the King’s private seal’ (a note by Duval, first secretary at the police magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, 1). In effect, in taking over a number o f pre-existing functions - the search for criminals, urban surveillance, economic and political supervision - the police magistratures and the magistrature-general that presided over them in Paris transposed them into a single, strict, administra­ tive machine: ‘All the radiations o f force and information that spread from the circumference culminate in the magistrate-general. . . . It is he who operates all the wheels that together produce order and harmony. The effects of his administration cannot be better compared than to the movement o f the celestial bodies’ (Des Essarts, 344 and 528).

But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized in the form o f a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked directly to the centre of political sovereignty, the type of power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements to which it applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body and not only by the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness o f the details it is concerned with. Police power must bear ‘over everything’: it is not however the totality o f the state nor of the kingdom as visible and invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust o f events, actions, behaviour, opinions - ‘everything that happens’; 7 the police are concerned with ‘those things of every moment’, those ‘unimportant things’, o f which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction (Supplement to the Instruction for the drawing up o f a new code, 1769, article 535). With the police, one is in the indefinite world o f a

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supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon o f the social b ody: ‘ T h e ministry o f the magistrates and police officers is o f the greatest importance; the objects that it embraces are in a sense definite, one m ay perceive them only b y a sufficiently detailed examination’ (Delamare, un­ numbered Preface): the infinitely small o f political power.

A n d , in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument o f permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable o f making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisi­ ble. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field o f perception: thousands o f eyes posted everyw here, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to L e Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the ‘ observers’ , w h o were paid regularly, the ‘basses mouches\ or secret agents, w ho were paid b y the day, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes. A n d this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series o f reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society b y means o f a complex documentary organization (on the police registers in the eighteenth century, cf. Chassaigne). A n d , unlike the methods o f judicial or administrative w riting, what was registered in this w a y were forms o f behaviour, attitudes, possibili­ ties, suspicions - a permanent account o f individuals’ behaviour.

N o w , it should be noted that, although this police supervision w as entirely ‘ in the hands o f the k in g’ , it did not function in a single direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond, b y manipulating the machinery o f justice, to the immediate wishes o f the king, but it was also capable o f responding to solicitations from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the k in g ’s private seal, which were long the sym bol o f arbitrary royal rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political grounds, were in fact demanded b y families, masters, local notables, neighbours, parish priests; and their function was to punish b y confinement a whole infra-penality, that o f disorder, agitation, dis­ obedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city and which he called ‘ offences o f non-surveillance’ . In short, the eighteenth-century police added a

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disciplinary function to its role as the auxiliary o f justice in the pursuit o f criminals and as an instrument for the political supervision o f plots, opposition movements or revolts. It was a complex func­ tion since it linked the absolute power o f the monarch to the lowest levels o f power disseminated in society; since, between these differ­ ent, enclosed institutions o f discipline (workshops, armies, schools), it extended an intermediary network, acting where they could not intervene, disciplining the non-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in the gaps, linked them together, guaranteed with its armed force an interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline. 'B y means o f a wise police, the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience’ (Vattel, 162).

T h e organization o f the police apparatus in the eighteenth century sanctioned a generalization o f the disciplines that became co-exten- sive with the state itself. Although it w as linked in the most explicit w a y with everything in the royal pow er that exceeded the exercise o f regular justice, it is understandable w h y the police offered such slight resistance to the rearrangement o f the judicial power; and w h y it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with ever- increasing weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt because it is the secular arm o f the judiciary; but it is also because, to a far greater degree than the judicial institution, it is identified, b y reason o f its extent and mechanisms, with a society o f the disciplinary type. Y e t it would be w ro n g to believe that the dis­ ciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for all b y a state apparatus.

‘ Discipline’ m ay be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type o f power, a m odality for its exercise, com ­ prising a whole set o f instruments, techniques, procedures, levels o f application, targets; it is a ‘ physics' o r an ‘ anatomy’ o f power, a technology. A n d it m ay be taken over either b y ‘specialized’ institu­ tions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses o f correction’ o f the nineteenth century), or b y institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), o r b y pre-existing authorities that find in it a means o f reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms o f pow er (one day w e should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become ‘disci­ plined’ , absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first

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educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus o f emergence for the disciplinary question o f the normal and the abnormal); or b y apparatuses that have made discipline their principle o f internal functioning (the disciplinarization o f the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally b y state apparatuses whose major, i f not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns o ver society as a whole (the police).

O n the whole, therefore, one can speak o f the formation o f a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort o f social ‘ quarantine’ , to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism o f ‘ panopticism’ . N o t because the disci­ plinary modality o f power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects o f power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution o f the power relations.

A few years after Bentham, Julius gave this society its birth certificate (Julius, 384-6). Speaking of the panoptic principle, he said that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity: it was an event in the ‘history o f the human mind’. In appearance, it is merely the solution o f a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type o f society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization o f spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection o f a small number o f objects’ : this was the problem to which the architecture o f temples, theatres and circuses responded. With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity o f festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new vigour and formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’ In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse o f the spectacle: ‘It was to the modem age, to the ever-growing influence o f the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details

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and all the relations o f social life, that was reserved the task of increasing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building and distribution o f buildings intended to observe a great multitude o f men at the same time/

Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had described as a technical programme. Our society is one not of spectacle, but o f surveillance; under the surface o f images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction o f exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits o f communication are the supports o f an accumulation and a centralization o f knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages o f power; it is not that the beautiful totality o f 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 o f power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The importance, in historical mythology, o f the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point o f junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise o f sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise o f indefinite discipline. He is the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape: "You may consider that no part o f the Empire is without surveillance, no crime, no offence, no contravention that remains unpunished, and that the eye o f the genius who can en­ lighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without, how­ ever, the slightest detail escaping his attention* (Treilhard, 14). At the moment o f its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still assumes with the Emperor the old aspect o f the power o f spectacle. As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper o f the ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which the pomp o f sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance o f intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.

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The formation o f the disciplinary society is connected with a number o f broad historical processes - economic, juridico-political and, lastly, scientific - o f which it forms part.

i. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering o f human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this; every system o f power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity o f the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics o f power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise o f power at the lowest possible cost (economic­ ally, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); 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 (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility o f all the elements o f the system. This triple objective o f the disciplines corresponds to a well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture was the large demographic thrust o f the eighteenth century; an increase in the floating population (one o f the primary objects o f discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change o f 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 o f the eighteenth century, the peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men). The other aspect o f the conjuncture was the growth in the apparatus o f 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 o f the disciplinary methods corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no doubt, to the new need to adjust their correlation. Neither the residual forms of feudal power nor the structures o f the administrative monarchy, nor the local mechanisms o f supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass they all formed together could carry out this role: they were hindered from doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension o f

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their network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all by the ‘costly* nature o f the power that was exercised in them. It was costly in several senses: because directly it cost a great deal to the Treasury; because the system o f corrupt offices and farmed-out taxes weighed indirectly, but very heavily, on the population; because the resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle o f per­ petual reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying (levying on money or products by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical taxation; levying on men or time by corvies o f press-ganging, by locking up or banishing vagabonds). The development o f the disci­ plines marks the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to a quite different economy: mechanisms o f power which, instead o f proceeding by deduction, are integrated into the productive effi­ ciency o f the apparatuses from within, into the growth o f this efficiency and into the use o f what it produces. For the old principle o f ‘levying-violence*, which governed the economy o f power, the disciplines substitute the principle o f ‘mildness-production-profit’. These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multi­ plicity o f men and the multiplication of the apparatuses o f produc­ tion (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).

In this task o f adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy o f power was not sufficiently equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity; reduce what is opposed to the use o f each of its elements and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages o f number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings o f individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize 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.

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Hence the fact that the disciplines use procedures o f 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 o f the continu­ ous, individualizing pyramid. They must also increase the particular utility o f each element o f the multiplicity, but by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multi­ plicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence, in order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use o f those overall methods known as time-tables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance. Furthermore, the disciplines must increase the effect o f utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each is made more useful than the simple sum o f its elements: it is in order to increase the utilizable effects o f the multiple that the disci­ plines define tactics o f distribution, reciprocal adjustment o f bodies, gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal co­ ordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside the very texture o f the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well articulated on the other functions o f these multiplicities and also in the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous instruments o f 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 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 disci­ plines are the ensemble o f minute technical inventions that made it possible to increase the useful size o f multiplicities by decreasing the inconveniences o f the power which, in order to make them useful, must 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 o f the one to the other becomes favourable.

I f the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation o f capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation o f men

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made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms o f power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology o f subjection. In fact, the two processes - the accumulation o f men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem o f the accumulation o f men without the growth o f an apparatus o f production capable o f both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity o f men useful accelerated the accumulation o f capital. At a less general level, the technological mutations o f the apparatus of production, the division o f labour and the elaboration o f the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. i, chapter X III and the very interesting analysis in Guerry and Deleule). Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell o f power within which the separation, coordination and supervision of tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning o f 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 o f military methods onto indus­ trial organization was an example o f this modelling o f the division o f labour following the model laid down by the schemata o f power. But, on the other hand, the technical analysis o f the process of production, its ‘mechanical* breaking-down, were projected onto the labour force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution o f those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the effect o f 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 maximized as a useful force. The growth o f a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality o f disci­ plinary power, whose general formulas, techniques o f submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions.

2. The panoptic modality o f power - at the elementary, tech­ nical, merely physical level at which it is situated - is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension o f the great

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juridico-political structures o f a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course o f the eighteenth century the politi­ cally dominant class was masked by the establishment o f an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization o f a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side o f these processes* The general juridical form that guaranteed a system o f rights that were egali­ tarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems o f micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it pos­ sible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority o f sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. 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. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

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 o f individual lives; or they appear as methods o f training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type o f law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort o f counter­ law. They have the precise role o f introducing insuperable asym­ metries and excluding reciprocities. First, because discipline creates between individuals a ‘private’ link, which is a relation o f constraints entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance o f a discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-reversible

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subordination of one group o f people by another, the ‘surplus’ power that is always fixed on the same side, the inequality o f posi­ tion o f 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 o f 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 disciplines 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 o f their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a ‘counter-law’. And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise o f power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which sup­ ports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry o f power and under­ mines the limits that are traced around the law. The minute disci­ plines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level of emergence o f 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 redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques o f discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that it has invented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation o f society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.

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To return to the problem o f 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 o f the law are applied selectively to certain individuals and always the same ones; at the point where the redefinition o f the juridical subject by the penalty becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point where the law is inverted and passes outside itself, and where the counter-law 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 o f panoptic techniques.

3. Taken one by one, most o f these techniques have a long history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. At this point, the disciplines crossed the ‘technological’ threshold. First the hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not sim­ ply ‘reordered' by the disciplines; they became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification could be used in them as an instrument o f subjection, and any growth o f power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge; it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made possible within the disciplinary element the formation o f clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology, the rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an episte- mological ‘thaw* through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication o f the effects of power through the formation and accumulation o f new forms o f knowledge.

The extension o f the disciplinary methods is inscribed in a broad historical process: the development at about the same time of many other technologies - agronomical, industrial, economic. But it must be recognized that, compared with the mining industries, the emerging chemical industries or methods of national accountancy, compared with the blast furnaces or the steam engine, panopticism has received little attention. It is regarded as not much more than a

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bizarre little utopia, a perverse dream - rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier o f a police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the form o f the Panopticon. And yet this represented the abstract formula of a very real technology, that o f individuals. There were many reasons why it received little praise; the most obvious is that the discourses to which it gave rise rarely acquired, except in the academic classifications, the status o f sciences; but the real reason is no doubt that the power that it operates and which it augments is a direct, physical power that men exercise upon one another. An inglorious culmination had an origin that could be only grudgingly acknowledged. But it would be unjust to compare the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine or Amici's microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they are much more. I f a historical equivalent or at least a point of comparison had to be found for them, it would be rather in the ‘inquisitorial* technique.

The eighteenth century invented the techniques o f discipline and the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investiga­ tion procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the increase o f the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth cen­ turies. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the juris­ prudence first o f the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures o f the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement o f God or even o f the transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number o f regulated techniques. Now, although the investiga­ tion has since then been an integral part o f western justice (even up to our own day), one must not forget either its political origin, its link with the birth o f the states and o f monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge. In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which, as we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages.

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It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics were born from techniques o f measurement; the sciences o f nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the end o f the Middle Ages, from the practices o f investigation. The great empirical knowledge that covered the things o f the world and transcribed them into the ordering o f an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the 'facts' (at a time when the western world was begin­ ning the economic and political conquest o f this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition - that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses o f our memory. But what this politico-juridical, administrative and criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of nature, disciplinary analysis has been to the sciences o f man. These sciences, which have so delighted our ‘humanity" for over a century, have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations. These investigations are perhaps to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences, what the terrible power o f investigation was to the calm knowledge o f the animals, the plants or the earth. Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold o f the classi­ cal age, Bacon, lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a methodology o f investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great Observer will produce the methodology o f examination for the human sciences? Unless, o f course, such a thing is not possible. For, although it is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical sciences, the investigation has detached itself from the inquisitorial procedure, in which it was historically rooted, the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it. It has always been and still is an intrinsic element o f the disciplines. O f course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And, in effect, its appearance in the form o f tests, interviews, interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms o f discipline: educational psychology is supposed to correct the rigours o f the school, just as the medical or psychiatric interview is supposed to rectify the effects o f the discipline o f work. But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in

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a concentrated or formalized form, the schema o f power-knowledge proper to each discipline (on this subject, cf. Tort). The great investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its politico-juridical model; the examination, on the other hand, is still caught up in disciplinary technology.

In the Middle Ages, the procedure o f investigation gradually superseded the old accusatory justice, by a process initiated from above; the disciplinary technique, on the other hand, insidiously and as if from below, has invaded a penal justice that is still, in principle, inquisitorial. All the great movements of extension that characterize modem penality - the problematization o f the criminal behind his crime, the concern with a punishment that is a correction, a therapy, a normalization, the division of the act of judgement between various authorities that are supposed to measure, assess, diagnose, cure, transform individuals - all this betrays the penetra­ tion of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition. 1 What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful* object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject o f an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point o f penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality 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 o f an examination, a proce­ dure that would be at the same time the permanent measure o f a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic move­ ment that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice o f placing individuals under ‘observation5 is a natural exten­ sion o f a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities o f surveillance and

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registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions o f the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?