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Title: Panopticism
Author: Michel Foucault
Date: 1975
Language: en
Topics: not-anarchist, panopticon, prison, discipline, biopower, bentham
Source: Retrieved on 06/08/2020 from libcom.org
Notes: From *Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison* (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195–228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977.

Michel Foucault

Panopticism

The following, according to an order published at the end of the

seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague

appeared in a town.

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its

outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death,

the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct

quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the

authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the

street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is

ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The

syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he

takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the

quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. Each

family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small

wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the

houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without

communicating with the suppliers and other residents; meat, fish and

herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it

is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn,

avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move

about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse

to another, the ‘crows’, who can be left to die: these are ‘people of

little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many

vile and abject offices’. It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space.

Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at

the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.

Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: ‘A

considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of

substance’, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter

to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute

authority of the magistrates, ‘as also to observe all disorder, theft

and extortion’. At each of the town gates there will be an observation

post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the intendant

visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have

carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to

complain of; they ‘observe their actions’. Every day, too, the syndic

goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each

house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live

overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the

street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of

them by name; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of

them — ‘in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the

truth under pain of death’; if someone does not appear at the window,

the syndic must ask why: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough

whether dead or sick are being concealed.’ Everyone locked up in his

cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself

when asked — it is the great review of the living and the dead.

This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration:

reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the

magistrates or mayor At the beginning of the ‘lock up’, the role of each

of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this

document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his

condition’: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to

the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his

daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of

the visits — deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities is noted down

and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have

complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician

in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary prepare

medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from

him a written note ‘to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with

those sick of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates’. The

registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The

relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes

through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it,

the decisions they take on it.

Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of

purifying the houses one by one is begun. All the inhabitants are made

to leave; in each room ‘the furniture and goods’ are raised from the

ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the room;

after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with

wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed

while the perfume is consumed; those who have carried out the work are

searched, as they were on entry, ‘in the presence of the residents of

the house, to see that they did not have something on their persons as

they left that they did not have on entering’. Four hours later, the

residents are allowed to re-enter their homes.

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in l 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 centre and 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.

The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible

confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are

mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death

overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his

body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an

omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular,

uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual,

of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to

him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play

its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the

festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions,

the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect,

individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure

under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth

to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was

exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, “but strict divisions;

not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the

smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete

hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks

that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of

his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease.

The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its

medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary

mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the

plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who

appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.

If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to

a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great

Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather

than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another,

it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an

organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification

and a ramification of power. The leper was caught up in a practice of

rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among

which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were

caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual

differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that

multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on

the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his

separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked; the

second analysed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest

of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first

is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society.

Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations,

of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town,

traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing;

the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears

in a distinct way over all individual bodies — this is the utopia of the

perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at

least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the

exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws

function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in

imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines

functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underlying

disciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of

confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from all

human contact, underlies projects of exclusion.

They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see

them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth

century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was

the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly

formed the real population) the technique of power proper to

disciplinary partitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project

the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of

internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution

proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of

individualization to mark exclusion — this is what was operated

regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth

century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory,

the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally

speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function

according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding

(mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive

assignment of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be;

how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a

constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way,

etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the

tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and,

on the other hand, the universality of disciplinary controls makes it

possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the

dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the

normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings

us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of

the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of

techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting

the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the

fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even

today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to

alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly

derive.

Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We

know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular

building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide

windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric

building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of

the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to

the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to

cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is

to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a

madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the

effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out

precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of

the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in

which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly

visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it

possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it

reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions

— to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide — it preserves only the

first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a

supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected.

Visibility is a trap.

To begin with, this made it possible — as a negative effect — to avoid

those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places

of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Each

individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he

is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him

from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does

not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in

communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower,

imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those

separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is

a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of

a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for

the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no

danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their

committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there

is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are

workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those

distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or

cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple

exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is

abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.

From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity

that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the

inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60–64).

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. So to arrange things that the surveillance is

permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action;

that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise

unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for

creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who

exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power

situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it

is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be

constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is

that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need

in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle

that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will

constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower

from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know

whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure

that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of

the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells,

cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on

the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside,

partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to

pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for

the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened

door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a

machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric

ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower,

one sees everything without ever being seen.

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes

power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain

concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an

arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which

individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by

which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is

a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.

Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual,

taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the

director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants

(Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him:

the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for

knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human

nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and

punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers

are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the

greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a

marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to,

produces homogeneous effects of power.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it

is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good

behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to

application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham

was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were

no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed

was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged.

The heaviness of the old ‘houses of security’, with their fortress-like

architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a

‘house of certainty’. The efficiency of power, its constraining force

have, in a sense, passed over to the other side — to the side of its

surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility,

and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power;

he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself

the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he

becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the

external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the

non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant,

profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that

avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in

advance.

Bentham does not say whether he was inspired, in his project, by Le

Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles: the first menagerie in which the

different elements are not, as they traditionally were, distributed in a

park (Loisel, 104–7). At the centre was an octagonal pavilion which, on

the first floor, consisted of only a single room, the king’s salon; on

every side large windows looked out onto seven cages (the eighth side

was reserved for the entrance), containing different species of animals.

By Bentham’s time, this menagerie had disappeared. But one finds in the

programme of the Panopticon a similar concern with individualizing

observation, with characterization and classification, with the

analytical arrangement of space. The Panopticon is a royal menagerie;

the animal is replaced by man,, individual distribution by specific

grouping and the king by the machinery of a furtive power. With this

exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist. It makes

it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the

symptoms of each individual, without the proximity of beds, the

circulation of miasmas, the effects of contagion confusing the clinical

tables; among school-children, It makes it possible to observe

performances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map

aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications

and, in relation to normal development, to distinguish ‘laziness and

stubbornness’ from ‘incurable imbecility’; among workers, it makes it

possible to note the aptitudes of each worker, compare the time he takes

to perform a task, and if they are paid by the day, to calculate their

wages (Bentham, 60–64).

So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was also a

laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to

alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with

medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on

prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most

effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the

workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments

— and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of

secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen

when, in their sixteenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with

other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought,

anyone could learn anything; one would follow ‘the genealogy of every

observable idea’; one could bring up different children according to

different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two

and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them

together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then

have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons

or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would have at least an

opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The

Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for

analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be

obtained from them. The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for

supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may

spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors,

foremen, teachers, warders; he will be able to judge them continuously,

alter their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and

it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector

arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able to

judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the

entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is

in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the — 5 director’s

own fate entirely bound up with it ? The incompetent physician who has

allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent prison governor or workshop

manager will be the first victims of an epidemic or a revolt. ‘ “By

every tie I could devise”, said the master of the Panopticon, “my own

fate had been bound up by me with theirs”’ (Bentham, 177). The

Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its

mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to

penetrate into men’s behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power,

discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which

power is exercised.

The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment — the differences

are important. They mark, at a distance of a century and a half, the

transformations of the disciplinary programme. In the first case, there

is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary evil, power is

mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible; it invents

new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions constructs

for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it

imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is reduced, in the final

analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple dualism of life and

death: that which moves brings death, and one kills that which moves.

The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable

model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the

everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham presents it as a particular

institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon

themselves, are common enough. As opposed to the ruined prisons,

littered with mechanisms of torture, to be seen in Piranese’s

engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact

that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many

variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary

intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years. But the

Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram

of a mechanism of l power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning,

abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be

represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a

figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any

specific use.

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but

also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the

insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a

type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in

relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of

centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and

modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals,

workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity

of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be

imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. It is — necessary

modifications apart — applicable ‘to all establishments whatsoever, in

which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by

buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection’

(Bentham, 40; although Bentham takes the penitentiary house as his prime

example, it is because it has many different functions to fulfil — safe

custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour and instruction).

In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the

exercise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce

the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of

those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at

any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the

offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these

conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised

spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose

effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical

instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on

individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’. The panoptic schema

makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in

material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its

preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic

mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power ‘in hitherto unexampled

quantity’, ‘a great and new instrument of government ...; its great

excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any

institution it may be thought proper to apply it to’ (Bentham, 66).

It’s a case of ‘it’s easy once you’ve thought of it’ in the political

sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education,

medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect

of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a

mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be

precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to

be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between ‘surplus

power’ and ‘surplus production’. In short, it arranges things in such a

way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a

rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly

present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its

own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a

point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a

way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a

function function through these power relations. Bentham’s Preface to

Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his

‘inspection-house’: ‘Morals reformed — health preserved — industry

invigorated — instruction diffused -public burthens lightened — Economy

seated, as it were, upon a rock — the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not

cut, but untied — all by a simple idea in architecture!’ (Bentham, 39)

Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its enclosed

nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have

seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the

functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a

clear idea of the way in which the surveillance is practised. In fact,

any panoptic institution, even if it is as rigorously closed as a

penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected to such irregular and

constant inspections: and not only by the appointed inspectors, but also

by the public; any member of society will have the right to come and see

with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons

function. There is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power

created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; he

disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will

be constantly accessible ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world’.

This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a

glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come and

observe any of the observers. The seeing machine was once a sort of dark

room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building

in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.

The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its

properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its

vocation was to become a generalized function. The plague-stricken town

provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, but absolutely

violent; to the disease that brought death, power opposed its perpetual

threat of death; life inside it was reduced to its simplest expression;

it was, against the power of death, the meticulous exercise of the right

of the sword. The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of

amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to

make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power

itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim

is to strengthen the social forces — to increase production, to develop

the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to

increase and multiply.

How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding

progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it

actually facilitates such progress ? What intensificator of power will

be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of production ? How will

power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those of society

instead of confiscating them or impeding them ? The Panopticon’s

solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be

assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in

the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if,

on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent,

discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty.

The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence,

with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others,

is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power represented by

panopticism; the domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole

lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their

multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations;

what are required are mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps,

series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible,

record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and

multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the

king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations.

At the theoretical level, Bentham defines another way of analysing the

social body and the power relations that traverse it; in terms of

practice, he defines-a procedure of subordination of bodies and forces

that must increase the utility of power while practising the economy of

the prince. 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. The celebrated, transparent, circular cage,

with its high towers powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a

project of perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show

how one may ‘unlock’ the disciplines and get them to function in a

diffused, multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body.

These disciplines~ which the classical age had elaborated in specific,

relatively enclosed places — barracks, schools, workshops — and whose

total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and temporary

scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of transforming into a

network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running

through society without interruption in space or in time. The panoptic

arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. It programmes,

at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the

basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with

disciplinary mechanisms.

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the

discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges

of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil,

breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with

panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that

must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid,

more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The

movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional

discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical

transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline

throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread

throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called

in general the disciplinary society.

A whole disciplinary generalization — the Benthamite physics of power

represents an acknowledgement of this — had operated throughout the

classical age. The spread of disciplinary institutions, whose network

was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and occupying above all a

less and less marginal position, testifies to this: what was an islet, a

privileged place, a circumstantial measure, or a singular model, became

a general formula; the regulations characteristic of the Protestant and

pious armies of William of Orange or of Gustavus Adolphus were

transformed into regulations for all the armies of Europe; the model

colleges of the Jesuits, or the schools of Batencour or Demia, following

the example set by Sturm, provided the outlines for the general forms of

educational discipline; the ordering of the naval and military hospitals

provided the model for the entire reorganization of hospitals in the

eighteenth century.

But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt only

the most visible aspect of various, more profound processes.

1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were

expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed populations,

to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were

being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming able to do

so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. Military discipline

is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, desertion or failure to

obey orders among the troops; it has become a basic technique to enable

the army to exist, not as an assembled crowd, but as a unity that

derives from this very unity an increase in its forces; discipline

increases the skill of each individual, coordinates these skills,

accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts of

attack without reducing their vigour, increases the capacity for

resistance, etc. The discipline of the workshop, while remaining a way

of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing

thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and

therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behaviour, but

more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces

bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy. When, in the

seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary

schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all

negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left

them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they

have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up,

they are unable to communicate a sound upbringing that they themselves

never had’; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance of God,

idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny,

brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always ready

to stir up public disorder and ‘virtually to exhaust the funds of the

Hotel-Dieu’ (Demia, 60–61). Now, at the beginning of the Revolution, the

end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to

‘fortify’, to ‘develop the body’, to prepare the child ‘for a future in

some mechanical work’, to give him ‘an observant eye, a sure hand and

prompt habits’ (Talleyrand’s Report to the Constituent Assembly, lo

September 1791, quoted by Leon, 106). The disciplines function

increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their

emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and

detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or

retreat. Hence the slow loosening of their kinship with religious

regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most

important, most central and most productive sectors of society. They

become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory

production,~the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes

and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees

developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number of

disciplinary institutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses.

2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one hand, the

disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain

tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed

fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’

state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible

methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the

closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role of

external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin of

lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile

children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to

gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety,

their morals. The school tends to constitute minute social observatories

that penetrate even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over

them: the bad behaviour of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate

pretext, according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbours,

especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not

tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, to

find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers, whether they

are determined to root out the vices of their children, how many beds

there are in the house and what the sleeping arrangements are; the visit

may end with the giving of alms, the present of a religious picture, or

the provision of additional beds (Demia, 39–40). Similarly, the hospital

is increasingly conceived of as a base for the medical observation of

the population outside; after the burning down of the Hotel-Dieu in

1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and

so disordered, should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals;

their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to

gather information, to be alert to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to

open dispensaries, to give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the

authorities informed ,of the sanitary state of the region.

One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the form of

enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation disseminated

throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long

played this role of ‘disciplining’ the population. From the

Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the July monarchy,

initiatives of this type continued to increase; their aims were

religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement

to work) or political (the struggle against discontent or agitation).

One has only to cite by way of example the regulations for the charity

associations in the Paris parishes. The territory to be covered was

divided into quarters and cantons and the members of the associations

divided themselves up along the same lines. These members had to visit

their respective areas regularly. ‘They will strive to eradicate places

of ill-repute, tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming house, public

scandals, blasphemy, impiety, and any other disorders that may come to

their knowledge.’ They will also have to make individual visits to the

poor; and the information to be obtained is laid down in regulations:

the stability of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the

sacraments, knowledge of a trade, morality (and ‘whether they have not

fallen into poverty through their own fault’); lastly, ‘one must learn

by skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there is

peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are careful to

bring up their children in the fear of God ... whether they do not have

their older children of different sexes sleeping together and with them,

whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery in their families,

especially in their older daughters. If one has any doubts as to whether

they are married, one must ask to see their marriage certificate’.

3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. In England, it was

private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the

functions of social discipline (cf. Radzinovitz, 203–14); in France,

although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds or

charity associations, another — and no doubt the most important part —

was very soon taken over by the police apparatus.

The organization of a centralized police had long been regarded, even by

contemporaries, as the most direct expression of absolutism; the

sovereign had wished to have ‘his own magistrate to whom he might

directly entrust his orders, his commissions, intentions, and who was

entrusted with the execution of orders and orders under the King’s

private seal’ (a note by Duval, first secretary at the police

magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, 1). In effect, in taking over a

number of pre-existing functions — the search for criminals, urban

surveillance, economic and political supervision the police

magistratures and the magistrature-general that presided over them in

Paris transposed them into a single, strict, administrative machine:

‘All the radiations of force and information that spread from the

circumference culminate in the magistrate-general.... It is he who

operates all the wheels that together produce order and harmony. The

effects of his administration cannot be better compared than to the

movement of the celestial bodies’ (Des Essarts, 344 and 528).

But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized in

the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked

directly to the centre of political sovereignty, the type of power that

it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements to which it

applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be coextensive

with the entire social body_and not only by the extreme limits that it

embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with.

Police power must bear ‘over everything’: it is not however the totality

of the state nor of the kingdom as visible and invisible body of the

monarch; it is the dust of events, actions, behaviour, opinions —

‘everything that happens’;’ the police are concerned with ‘those things

of every moment’, those ‘unimportant things’, of which Catherine II

spoke in her Great Instruction (Supplement to the Instruction for the

drawing up of a new code, 1769, article 535). With the police, one is in

the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the

most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social

body: ‘The ministry of the magistrates and police officers is of the

greatest importance; the objects that it embraces are in a sense

definite, one may perceive them only by a sufficiently detailed

examination’ (Delamare, unnumbered Preface): the infinitely small of

political power.

And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument

of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making

all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be

like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field

of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions

ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to Le

Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty

inspecteurs, then the ‘observers’, who were paid regularly, the ‘basses

mouches’, or secret agents, who were paid by the day, then the

informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes.

And this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series of

reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth century, an immense

police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex

documentary organization (on the police registers in the eighteenth

century, cf. Chassaigne). And, unlike the methods of judicial or

administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of

behaviour, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions — a permanent account of

individuals’ behaviour.

Now, it should be noted that, although this police supervision was

entirely ‘in the hands of the king’, it did not function in a single

direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond,

by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes of the

king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations from below;

the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the king’s private

seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal rule and which

brought detention into disrepute on political grounds, were in fact

demanded by families, masters, local notables, neighbours, parish

priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a whole

infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, disobedience, bad conduct;

those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally

perfect city and which he called ‘offences of non-surveillance’. In

short, the eighteenth-century police added a disciplinary function to

its role as the auxiliary of justice in the pursuit of criminals and as

an instrument for the political supervision of plots, opposition

movements or revolts. It was a complex function since it linked the

absolute power of the monarch to the lowest levels of power disseminated

in society; since, between these different, enclosed institutions of

discipline (workshops, armies, schools), it extended an intermediary

network, acting where they could not intervene, disciplining the

non-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in the gaps, linked them

together, guaranteed with its armed force an interstitial discipline and

a meta-discipline. ‘By means of a wise police, the sovereign accustoms

the people to order and obedience’ (Vattel, 162).

The organization of the police apparatus in the eighteenth century

sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines that became co-extensive

with the state itself. Although it was linked in the most explicit way

with everything in the royal power that exceeded the exercise of regular

justice, it is understandable why the police offered such slight

resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial power; and why it has

not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with everincreasing

weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt because it is the

secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also because to a far greater

degree than the judicial institution, it is identified, by reason of its

extent and mechanisms, with a society of the disciplinary type. Yet it

would be wrong to believe that the disciplinary functions were

confiscated and absorbed once and for all by a state apparatus.

‘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. And it may be taken over either by ‘specialized’

institutions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of the

nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential

instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing

authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their

internal mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial

relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become

‘disciplined’, absorbing since the classical age external schemata,

first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric,

psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of

emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal);

or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal

functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from

the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if

not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society

as a whole (the police).

On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a

disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed

disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely

generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disciplinary

modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has

infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an

intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and

above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most

minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of

the power relations.

A few years after Bentham, Julius gave this society its birth

certificate (Julius, 384–6). Speaking of the panoptic principle, he said

that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity: it was an

event in the ‘history of the human mind’. In appearance, it is merely

the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of

society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. ‘To

render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number

of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples,

theatres and circuses responded. With spectacle, there was a

predominance of public life, the intensity of festivals, sensual

proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new

vigour and formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses

the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a

single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’ In a

society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and

public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the

other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the

exact reverse of the spectacle: ‘It was to the modern age, to the

ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound

intervention in all the details and all the relations of social life,

that was reserved the task of increaSing and perfecting its guarantees,

by using and directing towards that great aim the building and

distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of men

at the same time.’

Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had

described as a technical programme. Our society is one not of spectacle,

but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in

depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the

meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; tbe circuits of

communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization

of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is

not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated,

repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual

is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces

and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in

the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine,

invested by its effects of power2 which we bring to ourselves since we

are part of its mechanism. The importance, in historical mythology, of

the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at

the point of junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty

and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. He is

the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no

detail, however minute, can escape: ‘You may consider that no part of

the Empire is without surveillance, no crime, no offence, no

contravention that remains unpunished, and that the eye of the genius

who can enlighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without,

however, the slightest detail escaping his attention’ (Treilhard, 14).

At the moment of its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still

assumes with the Emperor the old aspect of the power of spectacle. As a

monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the ancient throne

and the organizer of the new state, he combined into a single symbolic,

ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which the pomp of

sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were

extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a

panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to

render useless both the eagle and the sun.

The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of

broad historical processes — economic, juridico- political and, lastly,

scientific — of which it forms part.

1. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are

techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is true

that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this; every

system of power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity

of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the

multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly,

to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost

(economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its

discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the

little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this

social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as

possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this

‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses

(educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is

exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of

all the elements of the system. This triple objective of the disciplines

corresponds to a well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this

conjuncture was the large demographic thrust of the eighteenth century;

an increase in the floating population (one of the primary objects of

discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change of

quantitative scale in the groups to be supervised or manipulated (from

the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eve of the French

Revolution, the school population had been increasing rapidly, as had no

doubt the hospital population; by the end of the eighteenth century, the

peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men). The other aspect of the

conjuncture was the growth in the apparatus of production, which was

becoming more and more extended and complex, it was also becoming more

costly and its profitability had to be increased. The development of the

disciplinary methods corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no

doubt, to the new need to adjust their correlation. Neither the residual

forms of feudal power nor the structures of the administrative monarchy,

nor the local mechanisms of supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass

they all formed together could carry out this role: they were hindered

from doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension of their

network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all by the

‘costly’ nature of the power that was exercised in them. It was costly

in several senses: because directly it cost a great deal to the

Treasury; because the system of corrupt offices and farmed-out taxes

weighed indirectly, but very heavily, on the population; because the

resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle of perpetual

reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying (levying on

money or products by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical taxation;

levying on men or time by corvées of press-ganging, by locking up or

banishing vagabonds). The development of the disciplines marks the

appearance of elementary techniques belonging to a quite different

economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of proceeding by deduction,

are integrated into the productive efficiency of the apparatuses from

within, into the growth of this efficiency and into the use of what it

produces. For the old principle of ‘levying-violence’, which governed

the economy of power, the disciplines substitute the principle of

‘mildness-production- profit’. These are the techniques that make it

possible to adjust the multiplicity of men and the multiplication of the

apparatuses of production (and this means not only ‘production’ in the

strict sense, but also the production of knowledge and skills in the

school, the production of health in the hospitals, the production of

destructive force in the army).

In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems

for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently equipped. It

could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a

multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity; reduce what is

opposed to the use of each of its elements and of their sum; reduce

everything that may counter the advantages of number. That is why

discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up

confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering

about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated

distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from

the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize

the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a

resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts,

spontaneous organizations, coalitions — anything that may establish

horizontal conjunctions. Hence the fact that the disciplines use

procedures of partitioning and verticality, that they introduce, between

the different elements at the same level, as solid separations as

possible, that they define compact hierarchical networks, in short, that

they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the

technique of the continuous, individualizing pyramid. They must also

increase the particular utility of each element of the multiplicity, but

by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is to say,

by using the multiplicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence,

in order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of

those overall methods known as time-tables, collective training,

exercises, total and detailed surveillance. Furthermore, the disciplines

must increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so

that each is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is

in order to increase the utilizable effects of the multiple that the

disciplines define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment of

bodies, gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal

coordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the

disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but

inside the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible,

as well articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and

also in the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous

instruments of power, coextensive with the multiplicity that they

regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration,

perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a

power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise

it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to

form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy

the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disciplines are

the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it possible to

increase the useful size of multiplicities by decreasing the

inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, must

control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a nation, an army

or a school, reaches the threshold of a discipline when the relation of

the one to the other becomes favourable.

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made

possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the

methods for administering the accumulation of men 220 Panopticism made

possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual,

costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were

superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact,

the two processes — the accumulation of men and the accumulation of

capital — cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve

the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an

apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them;

conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative ‘rnultiplicity of

men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. At~a’ less general

level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the

division of labour and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques

sustained an ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol.

1, chapter XIII and the very interesting analysis in Guerry and

Deleule). Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a

model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell

of power within which the separation, coordination and supervision of

tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of

time, gestures and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that

could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the

mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods

onto industrial organization was an example of this modelling of the

division of labour following the model laid down by the schemata of

power. But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of

production, its ‘mechanical’ breaking-down, were projected onto the

labour force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of

those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they

bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the

effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary

technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the

least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist

economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power whose

general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short,

‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political

regimes, apparatuses or institutions.

2. The panoptic modality of power — at the elementary, technical, merely

physical level at which it is situated — is not under the immediate

dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political

structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent.

Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course

of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by

the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian

juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a

parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and

generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark

side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a

system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by

these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of

micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that

we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal way, the

representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or

without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of

sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the

submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporal disciplines

constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The

contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and

political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally

widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical

structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of

power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had

acquired. The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also

invented the disciplines.

In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an

infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the

infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of

training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general

demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different

scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The

disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law They have the

precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding

reciprocities. First, because discipline creates between individuals a

‘private’ link, which is a relation of constraints entirely different

from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a discipline may be

underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms

it brings into play, the non-reversible subordination of one group of

people by another, the ‘surplus’ power that is always fixed on the same

side, the inequality of position of the different ‘partners’ in relation

to the common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link

from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the

contractual link systematically from the moment it has as its content a

mechanism of discipline. We know, for example, how many real procedures

undermine the legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is

not the least important. Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define

juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines

characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale,

around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and,

if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and

during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play

the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that

is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutional

as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a ‘counter-law’. And,

although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits

on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables

it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both

immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry

of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. The

minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the

level of emergence of the great apparatuses and the great political

struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with

the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the

juridical norms according to which power was redistributed. Hence, no

doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small

techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that

it has invented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable

face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any

substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation

of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series

of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and

everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but

concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of

physico-political techniques.

To return to the problem of legal punishments, the prison with all the

corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point

where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to

observe; at the point where the universal punishments of the law are

applied selectively to certain individuals and always the same ones; at

the point where the redefinition of the juridical subject by the penalty

becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point where the law is

inverted and passes outside itself, and where the counter-law becomes

the effective and institutionalized content of the juridical forms. What

generalizes the power to punish, then, is not the universal

consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; it is the regular

extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques.

3. Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long history behind

them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being

combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation

of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another

in a circular process. At this point, the disciplines crossed the

‘technological’ threshold. First the hospital, then the school, then,

later, the workshop were not simply ‘reordered’ by the disciplines; they

became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of

objectification could be used in them as an instrument of subjection,

and any growth of power could give rise in them to possible branches of

knowledge; it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that

made possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical

medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology, the

rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an

epistemological ‘thaw’ through a refinement of power relations; a

multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and

accumulation of new forms of knowledge.

The extension of the disciplinary methods is inscribed in a broad

historical process: the development at about the same time of many other

technologies — agronomical, industrial, economic. But it must be

recognized that, compared with the mining industries, the emerging

chemical industries or methods of national accountancy, compared with

the blast furnaces or the steam engine, panopticism has received little

attention. It is regarded as not much more than a bizarre little utopia,

a perverse dream — rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier of a

police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the form of the

Panopticon. And yet this represented the abstract formula of a very real

technology, that of individuals. There were many reasons why it received

little praise; the most obvious is that the discourses to which it gave

rise rarely acquired, except in the academic classifications, the status

of sciences; but the real reason is no doubt that the power that it

operates and which it augments is a direct, physical power that men

exercise upon one another. An inglorious culmination had an origin that

could be only grudgingly acknowledged. But it would be unjust to compare

the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine or

Amici’s microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they are much

more. If a historical equivalent or at least a point of comparison had

to be found for them, it would be rather in the inquisitorial’

technique.

The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and the

examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial

investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investigation

procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had developed

above all with the reorganization of the Church and the increase of the

princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At this time it

permeated to a very large degree the jurisprudence first of the

ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. The investigation as an

authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus opposed

to the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the

judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals.

The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right

to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now,

although the investigation has since then been an integral part of

western justice (even up to our own day), one must not forget either its

political origin, its link with the birth of the states and of

monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the

formation of knowledge. In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt

crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical

sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental

knowledge, which, as we know, was very rapidly released at the end of

the Middle Ages. It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics

were born from techniques of measurement; the sciences of nature, in any

case, were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the

practices of investigation. The great empirical knowledge that covered

the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an

indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the

‘facts’ (at a time when the western world was beginning the economic and

political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt

in the Inquisition — that immense invention that our recent mildness has

placed in the dark recesses of our memory. But what this

politico-juridical, administrative and criminal, religious and lay,

investigation was to the sciences of nature, disciplinary analysis has

been to the sciences of man. These sciences, which have so delighted our

‘humanity’ for over a century, have their technical matrix in the petty,

malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations. These

investigations are perhaps to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy,

criminology, and so many other strange sciences, what the terrible power

of investigation was to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or

the earth. Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold of the

classical age, Bacon, lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a

methodology of investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great

Observer will produce the methodology of examination for the human

sciences ? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible. For,

although it is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical

sciences, the investigation has detached itself from the inquisitorial

procedure, in which it was historically rooted, the examination has

remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it. It

has always been and still is an intrinsic element of the disciplines. Of

course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by

integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And,

in effect, its appearance in the form of tests, interviews,

interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify the

mechanisms of discipline: educational psychology is supposed to correct

the rigours of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric interview

is supposed to rectify the effects of the discipline of work. But we

must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals from one

disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated

or formalized form, the schema of power- knowledge proper to each

discipline (on this subject, cf. Tort). The great investigation that

gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its

politico-juridical model; the examination, on the other hand, is still

caught up in disciplinary technology.

In the Middle Ages, the procedure of investigation gradually superseded

the old accusatory justice, by a process initiated from above; the

disciplinary technique, on the other hand, insidiously and as if from

below, has invaded a penal justice that is still, in principle,

inquisitorial. All the great movements of extension that characterize

modern penality — the problematization of the criminal behind his crime,

the concern with a punishment that is a correction, a therapy, a

normalization, the division of the act of judgement between various

authorities that are supposed to measure, assess, diagnose, cure,

transform individuals — all this betrays the penetration of the

disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition.

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its

‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up

against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an

ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme

point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite

segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the

strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total

destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of

penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation

without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a

meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would

at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed,

the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the

ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the

same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible

norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. The

public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by

the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’

is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and

examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with

its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance

and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply

the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of

penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools,

barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?