[A] few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared.
In this quote, Foucault describes the major shift he theorizes in Discipline and Punish: from punishment as a public spectacle to a private confinement. Criminals went from being tortured in public to being imprisoned in private. His point is that this shift was also a change in the importance people placed on the physical body. Punishment started to be thought of as something more spiritual than physical.
During the 150 or 200 years that Europe has been setting up its new penal systems, the judges have gradually, by means of a process that goes back very far indeed, taken to judging something other than crimes, namely, the “soul” of the criminal.
If the body disappears from punishment by the mid 1800s, then what becomes the target of punishment in its place? Foucault’s answer is that justice starts to aim at reforming the “soul” rather than punishing the body. This is a radical shift, because it means that the entire person has to be reformed, rather than just an action being punished. Discipline and Punish is about the rise of different bodies of knowledge that facilitated this shift, including the rise of psychological sciences that gave us types of people, rather than just types of crimes.
In fact, the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in illegal practices is correlative with an extension and a refinement of punitive practices.
Correlated with the shift from torture to imprisonment is another shift in the nature of crimes themselves. In torture, the crimes people cared about were especially physically violent crimes, such as murder. As societies shifted to prisons, they were more interested in crimes against property, such as theft. This is part of a larger trend in the rise of everyday people understanding their own power apart from the king. People didn’t just want to punish crime, but also protect their possessions. Prison seemed better equipped to address these kinds of crimes.
In effect the offense opposes an individual to the entire social body; in order to punish him, society has the right to oppose him in its entirety. It is an unequal struggle: on one side are all the forces, all the power, all the rights. And this is how it should be, since the defense of each individual is involved. Thus a formidable right to punish is established, since the offender becomes the common enemy. Indeed, he is worse than an enemy, for it is from within society that he delivers his blows—he is nothing less than a traitor, a “monster.” How could society not have an absolute right over him?
In a sovereign society, crime was conceived of as an affront to the king, since all the power rested in the sovereign. As power started to be conceived as belonging to the people as a whole, however, a new conception emerged. Now, the criminal was committing a crime against the people. He has violated society as a whole. Living in a society means there are certain norms we follow: I won’t steal from you and you won’t steal from me. Stealing from me not only violates me, but the social norms governing us. The criminal needs to be punished not just for his violation of other individuals, but for his violation of society, and punishment should therefore be about repairing society, or re-asserting the norms that govern us.
In organizing “cells,” “places,” and “ranks,” the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation; they carve out individual segments and establish operational links; they mark places and indicate values; they guarantee the obedience of individuals, but also a better economy of time and gesture. They are mixed spaces: real because they govern the disposition of buildings, rooms, furniture, but also ideal, because they are projected over this arrangement of characterizations, assessments, hierarchies.
In this passage, Foucault describes disciplinary spaces like the barracks, which disciplines soldiers, or the school, which disciplines students. His point is that these spaces work by organizing people both physically and psychologically. In a barracks, every soldier has his proper place and role, just as in a school, every student belongs to a particular grade and class, and within the class, every student has his designated desk. That’s the physical side of things. But this also trains people psychologically, to understand and submit to larger system of social hierarchy in which some people are ranked higher than others. Disciplinary spaces are powerful because they make visible more abstract things like hierarchy at the same time that they idealize, or turn into ideas, more physical things like the location of one’s desk.
The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation.
Discipline is a training of bodies to act and move in a certain way, such as a soldier following his regiment or a student going through her lessons. No matter what you’re disciplining or training someone to do, that person has to feel they are being observed. A student acts a certain way because she is being watched by a teacher, just like a soldier is disciplined by his officer. It is the feeling of being watched that compels, or coerces, people to act in a certain way. Foucault’s point is that people can be disciplined not only by being directly observed, but by thinking they are being observed. It doesn’t matter that a teacher is actually watching a student; so long as a student thinks she is being watched, she will do what she thinks the teacher wants.
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.
This is the key to the Panopticon: not that people are actually being watched at all times, but that people can feel they are—in part by never being sure if they are. It’s impossible to actually observe prisoners constantly. But if they feel they are being observed, then they will submit to the norms expected of them. Power will function “automatically,” which means people learn to discipline themselves rather than having to be told they are being watched.
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.
In this quote, Foucault makes explicit the role of the Panopticon in a new regime of power. Note first of all that the Panopticon has become Panopticism. This means we’re talking about a process of power abstracted from a building design itself. This process is one in which people always think they are being watched, for instance by everyone else in society. In such a society, power is distributed everywhere, because you’re not just worried about the king watching you, as in sovereign power, but about your neighbor or even the stranger walking down the street. This is the rise of disciplinary power, in which discipline is constantly happening.
“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.
In this quote, Foucault clarifies some of the theoretical consequences of his historical analysis. From his history of institutions like the hospital or the school, you might have thought only these institutions discipline their members into correct behavior. In contrast, Foucault argues discipline is a process at play throughout society at all times. It’s just particularly visible in certain institutions. But at all times, people are disciplined into social norms by a sense they are being watched by society at large.
For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous—and, on occasion, usable—form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathological subject.
Towards the end of the book, Foucault reflects on the fact that prisons actually rarely achieve what they promise to achieve. Crime and criminality continue to exist. But Foucault argues these failures are actually productive, in that they produce new concepts that society find useful. For instance, prisons “create” the type of person called the delinquent, whose life needs to be studied in order for him to be reformed. This makes any crime seem like the effect of a pathological person, and in turn, it reinforces that society at large is non-pathological. Prisons therefore work to reinforce social norms, and this is the most important effect.
