discipline & punish the birth of the prison

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. Power is everywhere, and people conform willingly, rather than being forced to conform by violence or the threat of violence.

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. Everyone disciplines themselves to fit into norms of correct behavior. In contrast, in a society of discipline, people are controlled more by social norms than by a king or central figure. Power is therefore centralized and localized. In a sovereign society, power is located in the sovereign: the king who controls the law and legitimizes the exercise of force or violence. He calls this society a society of “discipline” instead of a sovereign society. But Foucault thinks it is a figure for the state of power in modern society as a whole. The Panopticon, again, was a design for a prison. This makes power flexible and even infinite: since you never know when power is operating, it’s actually operating all the time. 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. 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. What matters is that they think they are being watched. Again, it doesn’t matter if people are actually being watched. Panopticism, for Foucault, is this condition of feeling constantly under surveillance. It was always possible you were being watched, and so there was always a pressure to behave correctly. 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. A prisoner in a cell could be seen at any time by a guard stationed in the tower. To achieve this effect, Bentham imagined a prison with a tall central tower and cells arranged in a circle surrounding it. “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. 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.

Discipline & punish the birth of the prison