was to create a pure community. The plague measures aim at a disciplined community. The plague stands as an image against which the idea of discipline was created. The existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising abnormal beings brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms created by the fear of the plague. All modern mechanisms for controlling abnormal individuals derive from these. Foucault introduces two idea of what he term's 'technologies of punishment'. Within these technologies are two representations of punishment; Monarchal Punishment referring to the public and torturous punishment practices present during and prior to the 18th century, and Disciplinary Punishment which refers to the incarceration of offenders and their subjection to the power of the prison officers. He also argues that disciplinary power often leads to self-policing of behaviour through fear of being caught disobeying the rules.
Foucault then
discusses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a building with a tower at the center
from which it is possible to see each cell in which a prisoner or schoolboy is
incarcerated. Visibility is a trap. Each individual is seen but cannot
communicate with the warders or other prisoners. The crowd is abolished. The
panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning
of power. Bentham decreed that power should be visible yet unverifiable. The
prisoner can always see the tower but never knows from where he is being
observed.
The possibility that
the panopticon is based on the royal menagerie at Versailles is raised. The
Panopticon allows on to do the work of a naturalist: drawing up tables and
taxonomies. It is also a laboratory of power, in which experiments are carried
out on prisoners and staff. The plague-stricken town and the panopticon
represent transformations of the disciplinary programme. The first case is an
exceptional situation, where power is mobilized against an extraordinary evil.
The second is a generalized model of human functioning, a way of defining power
relations in everyday life. The Panopticon is not a dream building, but a
diagram of power reduced to its ideal form. It perfects the operations of power
by increasing the number of people who can be controlled, and decreasing the
number needed to operate it. It gives power over people's minds through
architecture. As it can be inspected from outside, there is no danger of
tyranny.
The panopticon was
destined to spread throughout society. It makes power more economic and
effective. It does this to develop the economy, spread education and improve
public morality, not to save society. The panopticon represents the subordination
of bodies that increases the utility of power while dispensing with the need
for a prince. Bentham develops the idea that disciplines could be dispersed
throughout society. He provides a formula for the functioning of a society that
is penetrated by disciplinary mechanisms. There are two images of discipline:
which is the discipline blockade, an exceptional enclosed space on the edge of
society; and the discipline mechanism, a functional mechanism to make power
operate more efficiently.
The move from one to
the other represents the formation in the seventeenth and eighteenth century of
a disciplinary society. Other increasingly profound processes operated are the
functional inversion of disciplines, the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms;
mechanisms begin to circulate openly in society, and are broken down into
flexible methods of control and the state control of discipline, as in the
formation of a central police power.
The formation of a
disciplinary society in the movement from enclosed disciplines to an infinitely
extendible "panopticism". The formation of a disciplinary society is
connected to several historical processes: one) disciplines are techniques of
assuring the ordering of human masses that elaborate tactics of power that
operate economically and invisibly. These tactics aim to increase the docility
and utility of all elements of the system. This corresponds to a population
increase, and a rise in the numbers to be supervised. The development of a
capitalist economy led to a situation where these techniques could be operated
in diverse regimes. Two) the panoptic modality of power is not independent. The
disciplines and panopticism are the reverse of a process by which rights are
guaranteed. The Enlightenment, which invented the liberties, also invented the
disciplines. Three) what is new in the eighteenth century is the combination of
disciplinary techniques. This occurred within a development of other
technologies. The eighteenth century invented the examination, just as the
middle-ages invented the judicial inquisition; much of modern penal techniques
reveal the penetration of the examination into the inquisition.
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