Summary
The third chapter of Foucault’s section on “Discipline” is called “Panopticism.” Here, Foucault draws inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s proposed design of a prison he called a Panopticon. “Pan” means “all” and “optics” refers to sight; the Panopticon is therefore an institution in which everything is seen, or everyone is constantly under surveillance. To achieve this effect, Bentham imagined a prison with a tall central tower and cells arranged in a circle surrounding it. A prisoner in a cell could be seen at any time by a guard stationed in the tower. What was most important to Bentham is that even if a guard wasn’t actually watching a prisoner at a given time, the prisoner would have no way of knowing. It was always possible you were being watched, and so there was always a pressure to behave correctly.
Panopticism, for Foucault, is this condition of feeling constantly under surveillance. Again, it doesn’t matter if people are actually being watched. What matters is that they think they are being watched. In order for this to have a maximum effect, it should actually be the case that people can’t know for sure if, at any moment, they are in fact being watched. Power should be “visible and unverifiable”: the tower makes visible the possibility of being watched, but, unable to look into the tower himself, the prisoner can’t know at what exact times he’s being watched. This makes power flexible and even infinite: since you never know when power is operating, it’s actually operating all the time.
The Panopticon, again, was a design for a prison. But Foucault thinks it is a figure for the state of power in modern society as a whole. He calls this society a society of “discipline” instead of a sovereign society. In a sovereign society, power is located in the sovereign: the king who controls the law and legitimizes the exercise of force or violence. Power is therefore centralized and localized. In contrast, in a society of discipline, people are controlled more by social norms than by a king or central figure. Everyone disciplines themselves to fit into norms of correct behavior. And because norms belong to society and are therefore everywhere, people discipline themselves at all times, just like a prisoner who thinks he is always being watched. Power is everywhere, and people conform willingly, rather than being forced to conform by violence or the threat of violence.
To see the radical implications of this dynamic of power, Foucault opens the chapter by discussing how societies responded to the plague in the 1600s. In that case, the important thing was to quarantine people with the plague, which in turn created a division between the living and the dying. The dying had to be watched and sectioned off. In contrast, in a society ruled by social norms, everyone is being watched at all times, in part because they are watching themselves. There is no division between the good and the bad. Everyone has to keep being good all the time.
Foucault calls this the “generalization of surveillance.” It’s not just those with plague or those who commit a crime who feel they are being watched. It’s a condition of everyone, in general. It’s no longer a special part of being in certain institutions. It’s rather a part of being a member of society at all. Observation is distributed throughout society: people always imagine themselves watching or judging or being watched or judged by others.
This is what makes “discipline,” in Foucault’s final analysis, a “type of power.” In the previous part, we saw how particular institutions like the barracks and the school turned people into objects of study, constantly examining and observing them. But no institution owns this process. Observation continues to happen even outside the barracks or school, because social norms are everywhere. This is also why disciplinary power also does not belong to the government or the police or other “official” organs of power in a society. No one has control of norms, because they are everywhere and everyone is being watched by them.
One consequence of this movement from discipline being concentrated in institutions to it being a general type of power throughout all of society is what Foucault calls a “functional inversion of disciplines.” In the past, discipline was primarily about neutralizing danger. It therefore had a negation function: it wanted to get rid of, or negate, bad behaviors. Now, discipline also has a positive function of creating “productive citizens.” The aim is not just to destroy bad behaviors, but to create good people who are constantly contributing to society and acting in proper ways.
Analysis
In the previous section, we saw how Foucault conceived a similarity across different kinds of institutions. Schools, barracks, and hospitals all operated on principles of confinement in which everyone had a place and role to play. In this section, Foucault abstracts that process from the institutions and sees it at play more generally in society at large. This is the major transformation Foucault describes: how a kind of power that was practiced in a particular place becomes liberated from that place, floating throughout society to be practiced everywhere at all times.
This Panopticism, or general process distinct from a specific place or Panopticon, is a complex thing to grasp. What it means is that you always feel you’re being watched, which means you always feel the pressure to act properly. The point for Foucault is that you don’t have to be conscious of feeling like you are watched. Moreover, you don’t even have to be under surveillance at all. You could be alone at home by yourself, but you’ve so internalized the social norm to act correctly than you still act as you would if someone was watching you. In fact, disciplinary power is most powerful precisely because it is largely unconscious. The more people internalize norms, the more the power is entrenched.
It is worth mentioning that no one ever built a Panopticon in the 19th century. Jeremy Bentham wrote about it, but the building itself was never constructed. This isn’t really a problem for Foucault’s theory, since what matters is a general process rather than a physical thing. The Panopticon is a model of how he sees power operating. That means it’s more of a metaphor, and it’s the power of the metaphor, more than the fact of its existence, that Foucault is after.
This also shows the unique kind of history is Foucault’s doing, where he is less interested in things that were actually made and more interested in discourse, or the ways in which things were thought of or talked about. What matters to Foucault is not whether a kind of building was built, but rather, what it means that it was possible for someone to think about and desire that such a building be built. The simple thought of the Panopticon is telling us how people desire certain kinds of power even more than physical structures do. This is the utility of looking at discourse, the way in which it presents us unspoken assumptions about how people conceive their society.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Foucault’s emphasis on power operating at the level of creating “good people.” Sometimes we think of power as acting on citizens in a state, for instance. So there are citizens and then they do something and then the police punishes them. Foucault says that power has already acted by the time people even recognize themselves as citizens. That’s because the identity of citizen already has meanings attached to it in terms of how you act and the authority figures to whom you are subjected. There are no neutral identities. The second people identify as something, they are already doing so within a system of norms that shape behavior.
