The following, according to an order
published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures
to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.l
First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing
of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the
town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division
of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant.
Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it
under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned
to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors:
it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes
to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key
with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant
keeps it until the end of 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 of the houses, thus allowing
each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers
and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into
the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary
to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting.
Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets
and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another,
the 'crows', who can be left to die: these are 'people of 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. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of
his life, contagion or punishment.
Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert
everywhere: 'A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers
and men of substance', guards at the gates, at the town hall and in
every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the
most absolute authority of the magistrates, 'as also to observe all
disorder, theft and extortion'. At each of the town gates there will
be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every
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'. Every
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
windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allocated
a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show
themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to
the state of each and every one of them - 'in which respect the inhabitants
will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death'; if someone
does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: 'In this way
he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.'
Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering
to his name and showing himself when asked - it is the great review
of the living and the dead.
This surveillance is based on a system of permanent
registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the
intendants to the magistrates or mayor At the beginning of the 'lock
up', the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid
down, one by one; this document bears 'the name, age, sex of everyone,
notwithstanding his condition': a copy is sent to the intendant of
the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable
the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed
during the course of the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities
is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The
magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have
appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may 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 of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates'.
The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized.
The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes
through the representatives of power, the registration they make of
it, the decisions they take on it.
Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine,
the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun. All 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 who have carried
out the work are searched, as they were on entry, 'in the presence
of the residents of the house, to see that they did not have something
on their persons as they left that they did not have on entering'.
Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes.
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every
point, in l 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 work of writing links the
centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division,
according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual
is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings,
the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the
disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is
to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is
transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which
is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down
for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death,
his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that
subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate
determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what
belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which
is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one
of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around
the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing
time, bodies mingling 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 of the plague, which was exactly
its reverse: not the collective festival, ''but strict divisions;
not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even
the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the
complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power;
not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each
individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body,
his 'true' disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary,
of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline.
Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory
of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage,
desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.
If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals
of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and
general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to
disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between
one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations,
individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance
and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper
was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was
left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate;
those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning
in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects
of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the
great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other.
The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The
first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of
the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the
same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second
that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men,
of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous
mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy,
surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning
of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual
bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague
(envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of
which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In
order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the
jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in
order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the
state of plague. Underlying disciplinary projects the image of the
plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder; just as the
image of the leper, cut off from all human contact, underlies projects
of exclusion.
They are different projects, then, but not incompatible
ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity
of the nineteenth century that it applied to the space of exclusion
of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds,
madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique
of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat 'lepers' as 'plague
victims', project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the
confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical
distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use
procedures of individualization to mark exclusion - this is what was
operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of 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 of binary division and branding
(mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive
assignment of differential distribution (who he is; where he must
be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how
a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual
way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims;
the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded;
and, on the other hand, the universality of disciplinary controls
makes it possible to brand the 'leper' and to bring into play against
him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between
the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected,
brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and
exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a
whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising
and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms
to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power
which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to
brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which
they distantly derive.
Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural
figure of this composition. We 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
of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of
which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows,
one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the
other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one
end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor
in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient,
a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting,
one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the
light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They
are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor
is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic
mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly
and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle
of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to
deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates
the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better
than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.
To begin with, this made it possible - as a negative
effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were
to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described
by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to
a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but
the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions.
He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information,
never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite
the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions
of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.
And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are
convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape,
the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences;
if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are
madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another;
if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter,
no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no
theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the
rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd,
a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging
together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection
of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian,
it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised;
from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed
solitude (Bentham, 60-64).
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce
in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures
the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the
surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous
in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render
its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus
should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent
of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should
be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the
bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that
the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little,
for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much,
because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham
laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable.
Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall
outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable:
the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one
moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to
make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that
the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged
not only venetian blinds on the windows of 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 of
light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence
of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the
see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen,
without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without
ever being seen.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and
disindividualizes 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, disequilibrium,
difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power.
Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in
the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors,
even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what
motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of
a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit
this museum of 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 of being surprised
and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon
is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it
to, produces homogeneous effects of 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 work, the schoolboy
to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.
Bentham was 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. The heaviness of the old 'houses of security', with
their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple,
economic geometry of a 'house of certainty'. The efficiency_of power,
its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other
side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected
to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility
for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon
himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously
plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
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 of 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 of animals. By Bentham's time, this menagerie had
disappeared. But one finds in the programme of the Panopticon a similar
concern with individualizing observation, with characterization and
classification, with the analytical arrangement of space. The Panopticon
is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man,, individual distribution
by specific grouping and the king by the machinery of a furtive power.
With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist.
It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe
the symptoms of each individual, without the proximity of beds, the
circulation of miasmas, the effects of 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 of 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 of observation. But the Panopticon
was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out
experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals.
To experiment 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 simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best.
To try out pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up
once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using
orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their sixteenth
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 of every observable idea';
one could bring up different children according to different systems
of thought, making certain children believe that two and two 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 would have at least an opportunity
of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon
is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with
complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them.
The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own
mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the
employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen,
teachers, warders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter
their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and
it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector
arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able
to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how
the entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed
as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the
- 5 director's own fate entirely bound up with it? The incompetent
physician who has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent prison
governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an epidemic
or a revolt. ' "By every tie I could devise", said the master
of the Panopticon, "my own fate had been bound up by me with
theirs"' (Bentham, 177). The Panopticon functions as a kind of
laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains
in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behaviour;
knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of
knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.
The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment
- the differences are important. They mark, at a distance of a century
and a half, the transformations of the disciplinary programme. In
the first case, there is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary
evil, power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible;
it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions
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 of life and death: that which moves brings death, and one
kills that which moves. The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be
understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining
power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham
presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias,
perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough. As opposed
to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture, to be
seen in Piranese's engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious
cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time,
to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary
intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years. But
the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the
diagram of a mechanism of l power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning,
abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented
as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure
of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific
use.
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 work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution
of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization,
of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of
the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented
in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing
with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular
form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used.
It is - necessary modifications apart - applicable 'to all establishments
whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or
commanded by buildings, a number of 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 of its applications, it makes it possible
to perfect the exercise of power. It does this in several ways: because
it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing
the number of 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 'power of mind over mind'. The panoptic
schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy
(in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by
its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic
mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power 'in hitherto unexampled
quantity', 'a great and new instrument of government . . .; its great
excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving
to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to' (Bentham,
66).
It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it'
in the political sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function
(education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase
the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can
constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge)
may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes
that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between
'surplus power' and 'surplus production'. In short, it arranges things
in such a way that the exercise of 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 by
itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism
is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of
power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function
in a function, and of making a function function through these power
relations. Bentham's Preface to Panopticon opens with a list of the
benefits to be obtained from his 'inspection-house': 'Morals reformed
- health preserved - industry invigorated - instruction diffused -public
burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the
gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied - all by a simple
idea in architecture!' (Bentham, 39)
Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such
that its enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from
the outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the
central tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being
the case, he can gain a clear idea of the way in which the surveillance
is practised. In fact, any panoptic institution, even if it is as
rigorously closed as a penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected
to such irregular and constant inspections: and not only by the appointed
inspectors, but also by the public; any member of society will have
the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals,
factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the
increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into
tyranny; he disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled,
since it will be constantly accessible 'to the great tribunal committee
of the world'. This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer
may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables
everyone to come and observe any of the observers. The seeing machine
was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has
become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be
supervised by society as a whole.
The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such
or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout
the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.
The plague-stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model:
perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death,
power opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced
to its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the
meticulous exercise of the right of the sword. The Panopticon, on
the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges
power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective,
it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate
salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social
forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education,
raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.
How is power to be strengthened in such a way that,
far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules
and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator
of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of production?
How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those
of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The Panopticon's
solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power
can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously
in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way,
and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent,
discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty.
The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence,
with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others,
is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power represented
by panopticism; the domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that
whole lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details,
their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial
relations; what are required are mechanisms that analyse distributions,
gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render
visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational
and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person
of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these
relations. At the theoretical level, Bentham defines another way of
analysing the social body and the power relations that traverse it;
in terms of practice, he defines-a procedure of subordination of bodies
and forces that must increase the utility of power while practising
the economy of the prince. Panopticism is the general principle of
a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations
of sovereignty but the relations of discipline. The celebrated, transparent,
circular cage, with its high towers powerful and knowing, may have
been for Bentham a project of perfect disciplinary institution; but
he also set out to show how one may 'unlock' the disciplines and get
them to function in a diffused, multiple, polyvalent way 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 of a plague-stricken town,
Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would
be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption
in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the formula
for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an elementary
and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society
penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms.
There are two images, then, of discipline.
At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution,
established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative
functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time.
At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism:
a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by
making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle
coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the
other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized
surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension
of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation
of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.
A whole disciplinary generalization - the Benthamite
physics of power represents an acknowledgement of this - had operated
throughout the classical age. The spread of 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 of
the Protestant and pious armies of William of Orange or of Gustavus
Adolphus were transformed into regulations for all the armies of Europe;
the model colleges of the Jesuits, or the schools of Batencour or
Demia, following the example set by Sturm, provided the outlines for
the general forms of educational discipline; the ordering of the naval
and military hospitals provided the model for the entire reorganization
of hospitals in the eighteenth century.
But this extension of the disciplinary institutions
was no doubt only the most visible aspect of various, more profound
processes.
1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At
first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or
disturbed populations, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies;
now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming
able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. Military
discipline is no longer a mere means of 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 of each individual, coordinates
these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens
the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, increases the
capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the workshop, while
remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities,
of 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 of 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 of 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 of
God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny,
brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always ready
to stir up public disorder and 'virtually to exhaust the funds of
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 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,
lo 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 of their kinship with religious
regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most
important, most central and most productive sectors of society. They
become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory
production,~the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes
and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees
developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number
of disciplinary institutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses.
2. The swarming of 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 of external surveillance, developing around themselves
a whole margin of 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 of 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 of 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 of their children, how many beds there are in the house
and what the sleeping arrangements are; the visit may end with the
giving of alms, the present of a religious picture, or the provision
of additional beds (Demia, 39-40). Similarly, the hospital is increasingly
conceived of as a base for the medical observation of the population
outside; after the burning down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were
several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered,
should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals; their function
would be to take in the sick of 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
,of the sanitary state of the region.
One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures,
not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation
disseminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations
had long played this role of 'disciplining' the population. From the
Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the July monarchy, initiatives
of this type continued to increase; their aims were religious (conversion
and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to work) or political
(the struggle against discontent or agitation). One has only to cite
by way of example the regulations for the charity associations in
the Paris parishes. The territory to be covered was divided into quarters
and cantons and the members of the associations divided themselves
up along the same lines. These members had to visit their respective
areas regularly. 'They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute,
tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy,
impiety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.'
They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the
information to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability
of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments,
knowledge of a trade, morality (and 'whether they have not fallen
into poverty through their own fault'); lastly, 'one must learn by
skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there
is peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are careful
to bring up their children in the fear of God . . . whether they do
not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together
and with them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery
in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has
any doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their
marriage certificate'.5
3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline.
In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for
a long time, the functions of social discipline (cf. Radzinovitz,
203-14); in France, although a part of this role remained in the hands
of parish guilds or charity associations, another - and no doubt the
most important part - was very soon taken over by the police apparatus.
The organization of a centralized police had long
been regarded, even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression
of absolutism; the sovereign had wished to have 'his own magistrate
to whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, intentions,
and who was entrusted with the execution of 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 of 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, administrative machine:
'All the radiations of 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 of the celestial bodies' (Des Essarts, 344 and 528).
But, although the police as an institution were certainly
organized in the form of 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 of the
details it is concerned with. Police power must bear 'over everything':
it is not however the totality of the state nor of the kingdom as
visible and invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust of events,
actions, behaviour, opinions - 'everything that happens';' the police
are concerned with 'those things of every moment', those 'unimportant
things', of which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction (Supplement
to the Instruction for the drawing up of a new code, 1769, article
535). With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision
that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most
passing phenomenon of the social body: 'The ministry of the magistrates
and police officers is of the greatest importance; the objects that
it embraces are in a sense definite, one may perceive them only by
a sufficiently detailed examination' (Delamare, unnumbered Preface):
the infinitely small of political power.
And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be
given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance,
capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible.
It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social
body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere,
mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network
which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight
commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the 'observers', who were
paid regularly, the 'basses mouches', or secret agents, who were paid
by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and
finally the prostitutes. And this unceasing observation had to be
accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth
century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means
of a complex documentary organization (on the police registers in
the eighteenth century, cf. Chassaigne). And, unlike the methods of
judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way
were forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions - a
permanent account of individuals' behaviour.
Now, it should be noted that, although this police
supervision was entirely 'in the hands of the king', it did not function
in a single direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had
to correspond, by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate
wishes of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations
from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the
king's private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal
rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political grounds,
were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables, neighbours,
parish priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a
whole infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, disobedience, bad
conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally
perfect city and which he called 'offences of non-surveillance'. In
short, the eighteenth-century police added a disciplinary function
to its role as the auxiliary of justice in the pursuit of criminals
and as an instrument for the political supervision of plots, opposition
movements or revolts. It was a complex function since it linked the
absolute power of the monarch to the lowest levels of power disseminated
in society; since, between these different, enclosed institutions
of 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.
'By means of a wise police, the sovereign accustoms the people to
order and obedience' (Vattel, 162).
The organization of the police apparatus in the eighteenth
century sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines that became
co-extensive with the state itself. Although it was linked in the
most explicit way with everything in the royal power that exceeded
the exercise of regular justice, it is understandable why the police
offered such slight resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial
power; and why it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it,
with everincreasing weight, right up to the present day; this is no
doubt because it is the secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also
because to a far greater degree than the judicial institution, it
is identified, by reason of its extent and mechanisms, with a society
of the disciplinary type. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the
disciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for
all by a state apparatus.
'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution
nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise,
comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels
of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power,
a technology. And it may be taken over either by 'specialized' institutions
(the penitentiaries or 'houses of correction' of the nineteenth century),
or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular
end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find
in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms
of power (one day we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially
in the parents-children cell, have become 'disciplined', absorbing
since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military,
then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family
the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of
the normal and the abnormal); or by apparatuses that have made discipline
their principle of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of
the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally
by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to
assure that discipline 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 indefinitely
generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'. Not because the disciplinary
modality of 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 of power to
the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal
distribution of 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 of the human mind'. In appearance,
it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it,
a whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization
of spectacle. 'To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection
of a small number of objects': this was the problem to which the architecture
of temples, theatres and circuses responded. With spectacle, there
was a predominance of public life, the intensity of 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 of the spectacle: 'It was to the modern age,
to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound
intervention in all the details and all the relations of 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
of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of 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 of surveillance; under the surface of
images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction
of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of
useful forces; tbe circuits of communication are the supports of an
accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs
defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality
of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order,
it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according
to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks
than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage,
but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power2 which
we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The importance,
in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives
from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchical,
ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise
of 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 of the Empire is without surveillance, no
crime, no offence, no contravention that remains unpunished, and that
the eye of the genius who can enlighten all embraces the whole of
this vast machine, without, however, the slightest detail escaping
his attention' (Treilhard, 14). At the moment of its full blossoming,
the disciplinary society still assumes with the Emperor the old aspect
of the power of spectacle. As a monarch who is at one and the same
time a usurper of 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 of 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 of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the
eagle and the sun.
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 fulfils
three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest
possible cost (economically, 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
of all the elements of the system. This triple objective of the disciplines
corresponds to a well-known historical 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 peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men). The other aspect
of the conjuncture was the growth in the apparatus 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.
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 together 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 in several senses: because directly
it cost a great deal to the Treasury; because the system of corrupt
offices and farmed-out taxes weighed 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 corvées of press-ganging,
by locking up or banishing vagabonds). The development 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 integrated 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 substitute 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 destructive 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 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 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 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. Hence the fact that the
disciplines use procedures of partitioning and verticality, that they
introduce, between the different elements at the same level, as solid
separations as possible, that they define compact hierarchical networks,
in short, that they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity
the technique of the continuous, individualizing pyramid. They must
also increase the particular utility of each element of the multiplicity,
but by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is
to say, by using the multiplicity itself as an instrument of this
growth. Hence, in order to extract from bodies the maximum time and
force, the use of those overall methods known as time-tables, collective
training, exercises, total and detailed 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, reciprocal 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 manifested through the
brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies
those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these
individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty.
In a word, the disciplines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions
that made it possible to increase the useful size of multiplicities
by decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make
them useful, must control them. 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 favourable.
If the economic take-off of the West began with the
techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might
perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation
of men 220 Panopticism 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 accumulation
of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot 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 'rnultiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation
of capital. At~a' less general level, the technological mutations
of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration
of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close
relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chapter XIII 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 of power within which the separation, coordination
and supervision of tasks was 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 modelling
of the division of labour 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, were projected onto
the labour 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 maximized 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.
2. The panoptic modality of power - at the elementary,
technical, merely physical level at which it is situated - is not
under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great
juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not
absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie
became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant
class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally
egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization
of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and
generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark
side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed
a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported
by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems
of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical
that we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal way, the representative
regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without
relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of 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 of individual lives; or they appear
as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated
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 regarded as a sort of counter-law
They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries
and excluding reciprocities. First, because discipline creates between
individuals a 'private' 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 non-reversible subordination of
one group of people by another, the 'surplus' power that is always
fixed on the same side, the 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 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 of 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 of power, its
universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside
of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports,
reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits
that are traced around the law. The minute disciplines, the panopticisms
of every day may well be below the level of emergence 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 redistributed. 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 '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 of 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.
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 individuals
and always the same ones; at the point where the redefinition of 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 of
panoptic techniques.
3. Taken one by one, most of 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 simply 'reordered' by the
disciplines; they became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any
mechanism of objectification could be used in them as an instrument
of subjection, and any growth of 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
of clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology,
the rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an epistemological
'thaw' through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of
the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new
forms of knowledge.
The extension of 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 bizarre little
utopia, a perverse dream - rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier
of a police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the form of
the Panopticon. And yet this represented the abstract formula of a
very real technology, that of 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 of 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. If 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 of
discipline and the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented
the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means.
The investigation procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique,
had developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and
the increase of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the jurisprudence
first of 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 of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial
duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private
individuals. The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating
to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated
techniques. Now, although the investigation has since then been an
integral part of western justice (even up to our own day), one must
not forget either its political origin, its link with the birth of
the states and of 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. It is perhaps true to say
that, in Greece, mathematics were born from techniques of measurement;
the sciences of nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at
the end of the Middle Ages, from the practices of investigation. The
great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and
transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that
observes, describes and establishes the 'facts' (at a time when the
western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of
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 of 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 of 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 of investigation
was to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or the earth.
Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold of the classical
age, Bacon, lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a methodology of
investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great Observer will
produce the methodology of examination for the human sciences? Unless,
of 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 of the disciplines. Of 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 of tests, interviews, interrogations and consultations
is apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms of discipline: educational
psychology is supposed to correct the rigours of the school, just
as the medical or psychiatric interview is supposed to rectify the
effects of the discipline of work. But we must not be misled; these
techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority
to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form,
the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline (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 of 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 modern penality - the problematization of 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 penetration of
the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition.
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 of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary
individual. The extreme point of 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 of an examination, a procedure that would
be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to
an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet
in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a
procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals
under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with
disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising
that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour,
its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality,
who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have
become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons
resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble
prisons?
From Discipline & Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228
translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977
PANOPTICON - BY
JEREMY BENTHAM
http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm
