Imagery of Sovereign Power
Foucault opens Discipline and Punish with the image of a public execution:
On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned “to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris,” where he was to be "taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds"; then, "in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and claves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.” (3)
He starts with such detailed imagery of the torture of Damiens in order to give us an image of sovereign power, which manifests in public displays of power like this. It gives us the force of these public spectacles and a sense of how they might have had an impact on audiences at the time, who are invited to stand in awe of the violence the king has the authority to exercise. This is the image of sovereign power.
Imagery of Disciplinary Power
In contrast to the image of sovereign power above, the image of disciplinary power is one of institutions that contain and observe their inhabitants, like prisoners in a prison or patients in a hospital. Here is Foucault’s description of the physical nature of institutions:
This 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 work of writing links the center and the 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. (197)
This quote gives us the essential features of disciplinary power: how everyone in an institution is given a role in a chain or hierarchy of roles, and this makes it possible to know what you are supposed to do at every moment. It is a kind of social programming rather than a violent coercion.
