Discipline and Punish Study Guide

Discipline and Punish

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Contents
Discipline and Punish Study Guide.............................................................................................. 1

Contents...................................................................................................................................... 2

Summary..................................................................................................................................... 3

Section 1, Part 1.......................................................................................................................... 5

Section 1, Part 2.......................................................................................................................... 9

Section 2, Part 1........................................................................................................................ 13

Section 2, Part 2........................................................................................................................ 17

Section 3, Part 1........................................................................................................................ 21

Section 3, Part 2........................................................................................................................ 25

Section 3, Part 3........................................................................................................................ 29

Section 4, Part 1........................................................................................................................ 33

Section 4, Part 2........................................................................................................................ 37

Section 4, Part 3........................................................................................................................ 41

Important People....................................................................................................................... 44

Objects/Places........................................................................................................................... 46

Themes...................................................................................................................................... 48

Styles......................................................................................................................................... 52

Quotes....................................................................................................................................... 54

Topics for Discussion................................................................................................................. 57

2
Summary
The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Foucault, Michel.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage
Books, 1995.

Published in 1975, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a
study of the historical processes behind the development of punishment in the West,
particularly France. Foucault uses a genealogical method to examine the origins of the
power structures that control the modern penal system that led to the creation of a
docile and obedient populace. Discipline and Punish is divided into four sections, each
of which roughly correspond to a period in penal history. Although Foucault’s study is
not strictly chronological, he aims to show how the era of torture led to the development
of modern disciplinary society.

The first part, entitled, “Torture,” begins with two contrasting images. The first is a
description the 1757 public execution of Robert-Francois Damiens, who was
condemned to death for attempted regicide, and the second is an 1838 daily prison
schedule. Foucault writes that he wants to explore the forces that made the second
style of punishment emerge from the first. Absolutist France was characterized by
“supplice,” a means of punishment that targeted the body, through a public spectacle
that involved execution and torture of criminals. During this time, crimes were seen as a
direct attack against the King, who consequently had the right to revenge on the
criminal’s body; this was done in public as an affirmation of the sovereign’s power.
Despite the gruesome nature of torture, Foucault contends that he wishes to push back
against the notion that punishment has become more humane over time. With this in
mind, Foucault writes that he will investigate “the microphysics of power,” the covert
mechanisms through which power relations are inscribed onto the individual body.

The next part, “Punishment,” traces the concerns voiced by eighteenth century
reformers of punishment. The reformers, who were mostly lawyers from within the
system, argued that there should be a clear and unarbitrary link between a crime and its
penalty, punishment should work through “signs” that have a deterrent effect on the
general population, and there should be access to work and education. However,
Foucault suggests that these reformers were self-interested; the insistence on civil
rights was a product of the rise of the middle-class, indicating the social and political
changes that were about to take place in the French Revolution. These reformers
sought to create a more efficient form of power that functioned like a machine, a more
even distribution of punishment that individualized criminals while insisting on the
“humanity” of the criminal, which was really a new method of control.

The third part, “Discipline,” explores the creation of docile people alongside a new focus
on discipline starting from the eighteenth century. Developments in science converged
with disciplinary methods to create useful and obedient prisoners; methods such as
controlling their time and space served as a form of training that would cause people to
function as instruments of power. Following a military-camp layout, prisons, hospitals,

3
and schools began to function as surveillance institutions that observed individuals at all
times. Power used to target the body, but now it targeted “the soul” through vision, i.e
constant observation. The ultimate symbol of the modern disciplinary institution was
Bentham’s Panopticon, which was structured in a way that ensured that inmates never
knew whether they were being watched. The Panopticon, though never fully adopted,
envisioned the creation of individuals that were useful and obedient at a low cost. This
disciplinary method spread throughout many institutions and into the social body.

The final section, “The Prison,” turns to examine the nineteenth century emergence of
imprisonment as the main means of punishment. The rise of the middle-class
propagated the ideals of liberty and equality, which made the prison seem like a
“natural” development as something that targeted those values. The prison controlled
every part of an individual through the creation of a body of psychological, social, and
biological knowledge – they became “objects” to be known. This marked the
appearance of “delinquency,” a type of criminal that can be controlled through
disciplinary means. The goal of the prison was not necessarily to reduce crime, but to
control it through a police-prison-delinquency system that served the interests of the
bourgeoisie. Foucault characterizes this new disciplinary society as a “carceral
archipelago,” a network of institutions that wield their power across all areas of the
social body. Punishment extended beyond the prison system, as various institutions
targeted people that exhibited even the slightest amount of abnormality. Carceral
society normalized power-knowledge, to the extent that this extent of societal control
was unlikely to change.

Despite its failures, Foucault asserts that the real change to the prison system is
unlikely because of its pervasive influence on our society. Regardless, Foucault hopes
that his study will prompt further research into “the power of normalization and the
formation of knowledge in modern society” (308).

4
Section 1, Part 1
Summary
The first part of the book, entitled, “Torture,” begins with a section called “The body of
the condemned.” This opening section sets up two opposing images of criminal
punishment. The first is a newspaper article that describes the 1757 public execution of
Robert-Francois Damiens, who attempted to assassinate the king of France at the time,
Louis XV. Foucault provides grim details of Damiens’ torture and subsequent execution;
flesh was torn from his body with red-hot pincers, he was dismembered and burnt alive
after a botched attempt at being drawn and quartered. Foucault follows this scene with
an 1838 description of a daily schedule for prisoners drawn up by French politician Léon
Faucher.

Though he acknowledges that these two forms of punishment, being almost one
hundred years apart and dealing with different kinds of crimes, are not exactly the same
in nature, he writes that they help illustrate the drastic change that occurred in the
history of punishment. One change he aims to analyze is “the disappearance of torture
as a public spectacle” and challenge the notion that the reason for this is that mankind
has become more humane (7).

Foucault writes that by the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the body
ceased to be the target of criminal punishment, and the public ceremony of guilt (the
“amende honorable”) began to be viewed as a cruel practice. Consequently, the
process of punishment became more private and hidden from view; thus, the deterrence
of crime was to occur through its “inevitability, not from its visible intensity” (9).
Additionally, punishment began to focus less on inflicting pain on the body, and more on
the limitation of an individual’s personal liberties. As punishment became less visible
and corporeal, the authorities administering it began to distance themselves from the
process. Punishment was no longer seen as retribution against the criminal, but as a
source of shame for the authorities, an unfortunate necessity of criminal reformation.
Rather than being the domain of the judge and executioner, the administration of
punishment becomes dispersed among a network of “authorities,” such as doctors,
wardens, and psychiatrists.

The shift to the modern penal system carried with it a new aim: it ceased being directed
at punishing the external realm of the body, and instead shifted its focus at impacting
the prisoner’s “soul . . . the heart, the thoughts the will, the inclinations” (16). The way in
which crime being punished, Foucault contends, shifted as well, leading to a greater
consideration of the ontological nature of the crime. While before judges would
determine whether a punishable crime was committed, the modern penal system
attempts to ascertain the source of the crime, particularly its psychological,
environmental, and hereditary aspects, in relation to the identity of the individual. As a
result, punishment began to involve a web of disciplines aimed at creating a “whole new

5
system of truth,” in regard to the criminal, analysis of criminality became intertwined with
the act of punishment itself (23).

He then outlines four “rules” that will guide his “genealogical” study of the history of
punishment. The first is that he will treat punishment as a “complex social function,”
rather than mere repression of an individual. Second, he will consider punishment as
inextricably tied into power relations. Third, he will treat penal history as being related to
social history and the humanities. The last rule is that the body “is itself invested by
power relations” (23, 24).

Turning to the work of political theorists Rusche and Kirchheimer, Foucault writes that
he agrees with their contention that the over-arching goal of punishment is not to reduce
crime, and that punishment must be studied as a “social phenomena” (24). While
Foucault concedes to their Marxist idea that criminal punishment supports the dominant
mode of production, he adds that there is more to it than that: the body needs to be
examined as a subject of power relations.

He characterizes punishment as being subject to a “micro-physics of power” – not a

form of power that is possessed by authorities, but a strategic network of invisible
maneuvers that operate on a social and individual level. He adds that knowledge does
not exist as an ideal that is separate from the relations of power: domains of knowledge
are used in punishment, which then enforces its power on the basis of knowledge.
Foucault concludes this section by writing that examining the history of punishment,
particularly the political implications of the body, will explain the current structure of
society.

Analysis
In the opening section, “The body of the condemned,” Foucault lays out the principles
that will guide his study, which he classifies as an attempt to “study the metamorphosis
of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be
read as a common history of power relations and object relations” (24). Instead of
asserting that the body becomes irrelevant with the elimination of physical torture,
Foucault intends to argue that the role of body will be subject to a complex systemic
mechanism of subjugation.

The juxtaposition of the two opening scenes indicates that Foucault’s study is structured
on two historical stages: the medieval to early modern era of corporeal punishment, and
the nineteenth century emergence of a disciplinary prison. He writes that in between
these two periods, a span of less than one hundred years, “the entire economy of
punishment was redistributed” (7). Foucault insists that it is erroneous to conclude that
this move is merely a good one; rather, the socio-political intentions behind punishment
changed, which may be eclipsed by a self-congratulatory impulse to assert that
societies have become more humane.

6
The important thing to note in this section is that the changing character of punishment
over the two eras reveals the increasingly involved and complex role of the power
structures that govern society. Foucault asserts that the objective of punishment shifted
from targeting the body to “the soul,” which reflects the inextricability of knowledge from
power. The belief that the penal system has become more humane is, of course, related
to the decline of bodily torture, but Foucault believes that modern punishment operates
in an equally insidious but more inconspicuous manner than the infliction of bodily pain.
When Foucault writes that the modern penal system frames punishment through a
“whole new system of truth,” he means that different bodies of knowledge that were
solidified in the Enlightenment era have been appropriated for the purposes of
punishment to determine the character and extent of an individual’s criminality. The
expansion of science in the eighteenth century, particularly the use of psychiatry, for
example, began to be seen as an essential aspect of determining an individual’s
criminality.

Foucault’s point here is that the burgeoning network of authorities that began to control
punishment in the eighteenth century, the “extra-juridical elements and personnel,”
functioned as a new form of social control. While the era of the scaffold punished the
crime itself, the modern penal system frames punishment as not a merely legal matter,
but one that embodies the whole individual. In this sense, institutional authority is
capable of influencing our individual character – the modern penal system seeks to
“reform” criminals into a set notion of normative behavior and personality. This
multifaceted form of punishment challenges the concept of individual liberty and
selfhood, by positioning the individual as a product of “power-knowledge relations” that
treats the subject as an object that can be known and altered.

This leads Foucault to his assertion that punishment operates through a “micro-physics
of power” (26). In Foucault’s view, power is not something above and beyond us, in the
way that we are accustomed to thinking of the operation of the state; it is also not
something that we can identify as being outside and thus separate from our private
realms. Rather, power functions through and within us: it targets what Foucault calls the
“political technology of the body” (24). In this sense, the body is not seen as an
individual person or a material organism, but as a target for political control. Drawing
from Marx, Foucault characterizes the perceived value of the body in its capacity for
labor; that power structures subject people to exploitative labor, which they become
obligated out of necessity to partake in. Power, then, is a systemic force that works
through multiple means, a strategic “social process” that is capable of manifesting in
various forms.

Finally, Foucault characterizes his project as a “genealogy” – a word that requires

further explication. He writes that the history of this “micro-physics” is “a genealogy or
an element in a genealogy of the modern 'soul' (29). Drawing from Nietzsche’s use of
the term in his book Genealogy of Morals, Foucault’s invokes “genealogy” to
characterize his project as an investigative method that will illuminate the circumstances
of the present. Motivated by the current socio-political situation, a genealogy traces how
the present can be explained by the past, how ideological systems of thought have
developed to the point they are at now. Traditional history traces the linear development

7
of societies based on an assumption of the inevitability of events, which are treated as
immutable facts. Foucault’s genealogy, however, is an interpretative process that seeks
to uncover how power has led to the creation of the modern individual.

Vocabulary
regicide, amende honorable, edified, solicitude, blunderbusses, apportioning,
unequivocally, penitentiary, habeas corpus, attenuate, diminution, larceny,
maladjustments, codifiable, jurisprudence, expansionist, prognostic, subsidiary, docility,
homology, modality, aseptic

8
Section 1, Part 2
Summary
The next section, “The spectacle of the scaffold,” begins with description of the penal
practices of pre-revolutionary monarchial France. Foucault writes that French criminal
law was set by the Ordinance of 1670, which demanded harsh penalties such as torture
and execution. Yet, in reality, courts would often find ways to avoid enacting the death
penalty, either by refusing to prosecute crimes that were too severely punished, or by
changing the definition of the crime itself. Most punishment came down to banishment
or fines, but this era was still characterized by “supplice” – the public torture and
execution of criminals (33). Foucault writes that the torture enacted was a calculated
technique geared at producing a certain degree of pain. It also sought to reach the
“truth” behind the crime. Foucault characterizes “penal torture” as containing three
different elements: the significant but regulated infliction of pain, the performance of the
“ritual” of punishment where the accused is marked, and the spectacle of the
punishment that functioned as an expression of the sovereign’s power.

Most European countries kept the criminal procedures secret from both the public and
the person on trial; the latter of whom did not know the crime they were accused of nor
the evidence against them, and they did not have access to a lawyer. Foucault writes
that the secretive nature of the penal procedure reflected the fact that the most
important factor was the establishment of truth, which was exclusively the domain of
judges that acted in the power of the monarch. Certain rules were followed aimed at
attaining the truth; for example, prosecutors followed an “arithmetic,” which involved the
combination of half-proofs to form a “complete proof” against the accused.

Yet, the view at the time was that the confession, usually obtained through torture, was
the most important signifier of truth. The confession was considered the strongest proof
there was, and it functioned as a way of legitimizing penal authority. Foucault writes that
the paradoxical status of confessions as both the investigation and proof necessitated
the means to obtain it: an oath that carried the threat of perjury, and physical torture.

Torture that occurred in this pre-Enlightenment era was not a mere reproduction of the
torture that occurred during feudalism. It was more regulated, and had two aspects
absent in the medieval era: one, that the investigation occurred in private, and two, a
ritual act involving the accused in public. These two elements were brought together by
the public display of the body of the accused, a demonstration of suffering that
legitimized the unseen trial. Since confessions were so highly valued, if the accused did
not confess after torture, the judge would be forced to drop the charges, but in a manner
that did not necessarily declare the accused innocent. Foucault concludes that “pain,
confrontation and truth were bound together: they worked together on the patient's
body” (41).

9
In the period preceding the French Revolution, the public display of the accused was
important for several reasons. First, it made the accused a tangible manifestation of the
crime, thereby confirming the truth of the investigation. Second, it replicated his private
confession for the public. Third, it framed torture as a product of the crime itself, rather
than the judge. Finally, the spectacular nature of torture solidified the “truth” of the
“judicial ritual” (47).

Foucault then turns to the political aspect of public executions. Since laws represent the
will of the monarch, crimes were seen as a direct attack against the King.
Metaphorically, the accused becomes an enemy of the King, who in turn has a right to
punish as a form of revenge. A public execution is seen as a ceremony that functions as
“an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority” (49).

Foucault argues that the practices of public executions and torture reflect a disregard for
the body; from an economic perspective, a criminal body has little value if it cannot
contribute to the labor market. Additionally, Christian attitudes towards death placed little
value on bodily existence on earth. The prevalence of disease and starvation made
death more ubiquitous, and thus easier to accept. Yet, these reasons do not explain why
the Ordinance of 1670 carried harsher punishments than in the past. Foucault sees this
as a sign of the fragility of the monarchy, an attempt to re-assert power over French
society.

The Enlightenment condemned torture as “an atrocity,” but did not realize its political
implications: it served as the ultimate expression of the monarch’s power to the
populace (55). Over time, lower classes began to identify with criminals, and even root
for them – a way of hedging complaints against the monarch that they could not make in
most circumstances. Broadsheets became popular with the lower classes, leading to an
idealized vision of the criminal as a hero. The popularity of these broadsheets was
transformed into a new form of “criminal literature” by the middle-class, which Freud
suggests was an appropriated form of social dissent.

Analysis
In this section, Foucault traces the main form of punishment in the period preceding the
French Revolution: the public display of torture and execution. What is significant in this
section is that Foucault implicitly challenges a linear conception of history. Instead of
making the argument that penal punishment became progressively more humane over
time, Foucault contends each form of punishment reflects the society of the historical
period it is in; the “degree” of penal cruelty does not lessen over time, but is a product of
the aims of those in power. Thus, the harsher punishments imposed by the Ordinance
of 1670 fittingly occurs the post-feudal rise of Absolutism in France, where efforts were
made by the monarchy to make demonstrations of the absolute authority of the King’s
power.

Foucault’s use of the term “supplice” requires further explanation; though the translators
render it as “torture,” Foucault’s use of the term refers to a more complex system of

10
punishment. Drawing from French scholar Louis De Jaucourt, Foucault defines
“supplice” as “corporeal punishment, painful to a more or less horrible degree . . . an
inexplicable phenomenon that the extension of man's imagination creates out of the
barbarous and the cruel (33). But Foucault goes out of his way to amend this definition;
despite the harsh prevalence of public torture, it was not “the extreme expression of
lawless rage” – it could be cruel, but it was not unrestrained (33). Foucault insists that it
torture is a “technique” that is structured enough to obey criteria, such as the calculated
infliction of pain. Foucault also emphasizes the political aspect of “supplice,” which
functions as a microcosm of the power relations that characterized France at the time.
This makes seventeenth century torture markedly different from the medieval era,
because it is divested in different political aims.

Another thing to note is the dichotomy Foucault sets up between the secret and visible
aspects of punishment. In a paradoxical way, punishment in the early modern era
contained public and private elements, together combined to reach a notion of mediated
truth. Even though the main aspect of “supplice” is the public act of viewing the bodily
punishment, Foucault explains that the investigation of the crime itself is done in private.
This was the case because the establishment of truth was considered to be the sole
domain of the King, which was expressed through the judges that acted in his power.
Foucault contends that secrecy was deemed necessary because there was fear that if
the “multitude” was a part of the investigation, they could get too disorderly and thus too
involved in the process: The King had to show that he alone controlled justice, and that
it was above and beyond the common people. The secret nature of the investigation is
also a step toward modern disciplinary punishment; as Foucault writes in the previous
chapter, punishment that is not seen derives its power from having an abstract presence
in every day consciousness. In this way, that which is not seen has a formidable
presence in its obscurity. This solidifies Foucault’s point that knowledge itself becomes
controlled and express by those in power.

Yet, in the early modern era the visibility of “supplice,” the performance of punishment in
the public arena, was also an affirmation of the monarch’s ultimate power. Not only did it
function as a form of deterrence for the audience to witness the punishment, but its
spectacular nature operated as a victory of truth in which the monarch became the
arbiter of justice. While these public punishments drew crowds out of curiosity, another
reason that people came to watch is because the scene itself carried spiritual
significance. Foucault characterizes the public spectacle of punishment as a “sign” to be
interpreted by the audience indicative of the tension between the judgment of God and
the judgment of man: it is either a sign that the accused will be saved by God in the
afterlife, for having endured grave earthly punishment, or that the punishment is an
inkling of the eternal damnation that awaits the accused. The ambiguity of the sign
heightens the spectacle of punishment: it becomes both a demonstration of the earthly
and divine power to punish.

A final thing to note is the significance of the body in Foucault’s project – it becomes a
powerful marker of truth. Namely, the polarity between the secretive nature of the
investigation, coupled with the visible spectacle of punishment, converges on the body
of the accused. For Foucault, the body functions as a literal and metaphorical

11
manifestation of those in power; it carries the external markings of the torture as well as
being a symbol of the public performance of justice. The relations of power have
managed to create a new notion of truth where the usefulness of the body, and by
extension the individual, relies on obedience to the state. In this way, power becomes
written on the body, which has been rendered a disempowered subject due to the
“micro-physics” of power.

Vocabulary
pecuniary, confiscation, reclusion, denunciations, vagabond, casuistry, inquisitorial,
jurisprudence, ostentation, liturgy, punctilious, polemic, indissociably, infinitesimal,
saturnalia, indomitability

12
Section 2, Part 1
Summary
Foucault begins the next section, “Generalized punishment,” with a late eighteenth
century account for a call for penal reform. At that time, protests against public
executions became increasingly common by lawyers, intellectuals, and government
officials. The reformers viewed punishment during the absolutism as a violent interaction
between the King and the people; instead, they argued, “criminal justice should simply
punish” (74).

This call for reform, Foucault argues, was performed under a pretense of concern over
the inhumanity of torture. He suggests that the call was rather a strategic move on the
part of the middle class to limit the monarchy’s power. The move away from torture led
to the “man-measure . . . of power (74). In order to explain this new form of power,
Foucault writes that we should not simply look to the reformers of the penal system, but
that we should examine the social and economic reality of the eighteenth century.

A noticeable change occurred in the kind of criminal activity that occurred: starting from
the end of the seventeenth century, there was a decrease in violent crimes and an
increase in crimes involving “property . . . theft and swindling” (75). Accordingly,
criminality became less about physical attacks, and more about the theft of goods and
fraud. Foucault contends that the shift to non-violent crimes indicates “a whole complex
mechanism” related to the increase in wealth due to increased production, a higher
value placed on property, and an increased policing of the lower classes. Thus, Foucault
argues that what emerged was “a closer penal mapping of the social body” – a new
method of social control that involved increased institutional attention on the populace
(78).

The reformers argued that power had become “denatured” in three ways: hereditary
judgeships began to be sold as commodities, which increased the costs of the court
system, the King could make laws and not follow them, and the exercise of the law was
inconsistent (78-9). Thus, the reformers criticized a “bad economy of power” (80); they
held that the act of punishment should be more evenly distributed among the different
bodies of power, rather than being subject to the arbitrariness and self-interest of the
monarchy. Foucault further writes that the drive for reform occurred largely within the
legal system, particularly through the appeals of magistrates and lawyers that sought for
a better distribution of power.

Next, Foucault argues that different social classes tolerated different levels of illegality.
The middle class often encouraged the lower classes to commit small crimes because it
helped undermine the monarchy’s control of the market. Yet certain kinds of “popular
illegality” were condemned by the middle class, especially when property was involved.
Essentially, the middle class ended up defining the justice system by making property
theft more punishable (as it affected them directly) than crimes that resisted the power

13
of the king. The emergence of the middle class characterized punishment as a contract
with the rest of society, rather than with the sovereign. While punishment used to be the
King’s vengeance, punishment now was geared at avoiding repetition of the same crime
– it becomes a “sign that serves as an obstacle” (94).

This new semiotics of punishment obeyed six rules. First, “the rule of minimum
quantity,” meaning avoiding punishment must have a greater advantage than
committing the crime itself.

Second, “the rule of sufficient ideality,” which means that punishment should discourage
not pain itself but the idea of pain. Punishment is effective when the resulting
disadvantage is greater than the advantage, so the “idea” of pain must be memorable.

Third, “the rule of lateral effects,” means that that the penalty must target those that do
not commit crime. Punishment must have a preventative effect that emerges from the
creation a lasting impression of a “single idea,” a symbolic impression of punishment
that discourages people from crime.

Fourth, “the rule of perfect certainty,” means that the laws that define the punishment
must be clear and accessible to the public.

Fifth, “the rule of common truth” indicates that the trial must be public and the
punishment must be well-reasoned.

Sixth, “the rule of optimal specification,” means that the punishment must precisely
correspond to the crime committed. There must be a legal code that defines and
classifies all crimes and their resultant penalties.

The transition in penal history is marked by increased “individualization” – a shift to a

focus on the accused’s motives and inclinations rather than the criminal act itself. There
was also a movement toward the classification of crimes. Two trends of criminal
objectification emerge: the first is viewing the criminal as a violation of normality, an
outsider on the fringes of society. The other trend was a scientific approach that treated
crime as measurable.

Foucault concludes this section by writing that Enlightenment “Idéologues” developed

this semiotics of punishment as a move against the monarchy. Unlike the spectacle of
punishment which targeted the body, this new view of punishment had an ideological
function which used the mind as a target for its power, leading to a “new politics of the
body” (103).

Analysis
This section begins the second part of Foucault’s analysis, called “Punishment.” In this
section, Foucault outlines the transitional period between the penal torture of the
absolutist era, described in the first part, and the modern disciplinary penal system,
which he will cover in the third part. While he does not specifically refer to French

14
Revolution, a lot of what he discusses in this section makes up the views and
circumstances that drove it to come into fruition.

The main point in this section expands on Foucault’s previous assertion that
punishment has not become gradually more humane over time. Instead, we see that
penal reform was largely motivated by political aims that sought for a redistribution of
power in order to undermine the monarchy and strengthen the middle class. The
emergent focus on the criminal’s “humanity” became a new way to enact power.

In this vein, the insistence on the humanity of the criminal meant that individuals
became the legal limit of the power to punish, what Foucault calls the “man-measure . . .
of power (74). In other words, the individual themselves became the measure against
which the power to punish was determined. While in an absolutist regime any notion of
civil liberty was a privilege bestowed by the King on his subjects, the reformers began to
insist on an individual’s civil rights. Additionally, the prevalence of natural history in the
seventeenth century meant that science was used to define or “measure” what it meant
to be human. Thus Foucault’s point is that the idea of “man” and “measure” somehow
formed a “single strategy” against corporeal punishment and toward a reformed, more
humane penal system (74). Foucault thinks that these two elements, the newfound
respect for human dignity and the movement toward scientific study of humanity,
functioned as the driving force toward a new form of power. These two modes of
thought also indicate that during this time, penal reform was geared at the
establishment of a new socio-political structure that would weaken the influence of the
sovereignty.

Reform was also made possible by social and economic changes in the period in which
the crime itself changed in character. Foucault’s analysis reveals that criminality ceased
being a form of resistance against the monarch and shifted to attacking society itself.
This relatively new conception of a social body indicates that a middle-class mentality
began to emerge even before the Revolution occurred. Foucault grounds this socio-
political change in increased production extension capitalism: as the standard of living,
value of personal property, and individual wealth increased, crime that targeted these
areas became ubiquitous.

Yet Foucault refuses to take these changes at face value, calling them a “strategic
coincidence,” for the reformers (77). He insists that penal reform was not a change in
“spirit” but “an effort to adjust the mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of
individuals”; an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that assumes
responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behavior, their identity,
their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures (77-8). Foucault here draws an
opposition between the new machine-like operation of power to the “irregularity” of the
King’s power. The implications of Foucault’s industrial metaphor are serious: he is
saying that the reformers were interested in making the mechanism of power not more
lenient, but more efficient. For Foucault, this new form of power is, in a way, more
insidious because it is capable of permeating every aspect of a human being.

15
Even though Foucault is writing about the seventeenth century, he is clearly echoing
Marx, implying that the there was a rise of the middle class that was only looking out for
its own interests. This point is also emphasized in his discussion of “popular illegality,”
as the middle class only sought to punish economic crimes that impacted them directly.
As French society became more commercial, illegal behavior that targeted theft of
goods became more strictly criminalized than under absolutism. Foucault’s writes that
“the economy of illegalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society,”
leading to a new distinction between the “illegality of property” and the “illegality of
rights” (87). Knowing that the lower classes were to commit such crimes of the former,
the middle class made the latter their exclusive domain, as they knew they had enough
money and knowledge to take advantage of loopholes in the law.

Foucault argues that the strategic manipulation of the middle class created a
mechanistic technology of power where “one must punish exactly enough” to prevent
repetition of the crime (93). The drive to make punishment more standardized and
calculable led to what Foucault calls a “semio-technique” of punishment – a system of
signs meant to create a mental link between crime and punishment in order to deter
crime. Yet, examining the six rules that Foucault lists reveals a contradiction of
intentions. Namely, laws needed to become more precise, and thus completely
categorized, but they also took the criminal’s status as an individual into account.
Foucault’s point is that the semiotics of punishment conflate the general (categories of
punishment) with the specific (a focus on individualization) which results in an increased
surveillance of society. The notion that each crime must have an exact corresponding
penalty is the bridge toward the disciplinary style of punishment that Foucault will
elucidate in the next section.

Vocabulary
insuperable, polemic, malefactors, furtive, diminution, denatured, obstinacy,
depredation, delimitation, panoply, elision, Eleatic, casuistic, sumptuous, expenditure

16
Section 2, Part 2
Summary
In “The gentle way in punishment,” Foucault continues his analysis of eighteenth
century penal reform, listing six rules that characterize its “whole technology of
representation” (104).

The first rule is that there must be a clear link between a crime and its penalty. The
reformers desired that there should be a rational connection between the crime and “the
sign” of its penalty, so that punishment is not the arbitrary consequence of sovereign
power. The second rule is that the representation of punishment should reduce the urge
to commit the crime and increase the desire to avoid the penalty. In this way, the penalty
should instill good habits over bad ones; Foucault quotes one reformer who claims that
“the best way of punishing them is to employ them. Against a bad passion, a good habit”
(106). The third rule states that penalties should have an appropriate duration
associated with them, meaning that the end is foreseeable. Most punishment should not
be “permanent,” because otherwise the criminal would have no motivation to reform
their habits.

Fourth, the “obstacle-signs” that form the representation of a crime should have a
deterrent effect for the general population. The point of punishment is to convince the
populace that it is the natural consequence of an undesirable outcome. Rather than
attacking the sovereign, crime now was viewed as an attack against society, which
everyone had a collective interest to avoid. Fifth, punishment should have a
pedagogical function as a “representation of public morality” (110). For this reason, the
criminal must be visible to the public and information of the crime spread through
posters and placards. The criminal thus becomes a lesson for others; they are
simultaneously mourned for their transgression and used as a representation of the
benefits for not committing crime. The last rule seeks to “[invert] the traditional discourse
of crime,” meaning to end its glorification (112). The criminal should not be regarded as
a hero in popular perception, but an unfortunate counter-example of positive societal
values, a living example of the “misfortunes of vice” (113).

Next, Foucault transitions to discussing imprisonment, which at this point was seen as
irreconcilable with the idea of punishment as an “obstacle-sign.” Imprisonment was not
yet the preferred method of punishment because it was not seen to have an effect on
the public. Yet, Foucault contends that within a short amount of time, imprisonment
quickly emerged as the dominant penalty for all crimes; he cites the French penal code
of 1810, which already listed detention as the main method of punishment, and the plan
for a large prison structure. The “theatre of punishment” which the reformers wanted to
enact was quickly replaced by the “great uniform machinery of the prisons” (116).

Foucault’s point, then, is to question how the prison had become the dominant form of
punishment by the early nineteenth century. There were two obstacles to the

17
emergence of the prison: one, that prior to penal reform, it was seen as a temporary
punishment until a proper one could be enacted, or as a punishment for women and
children who could not handle other kinds. Second, imprisonment was associated with
the former abuses of power during absolutism, when a monarch could arbitrarily
imprison its subjects.

The common explanation for the unexpected emergence of the prison is that older
models of punishment came from outside of France. Foucault cites several such
models, one being the Amsterdam Rasphius, a prison that opened in 1596, and the
Maison de Force at Ghent. These earlier institutions sought to rehabilitate inmates by
instilling a work ethic and establishing a system of rewards for good behavior. An
English model added the element of isolation, in order to “shock” the inmate to
recognize the bad influence of others and undergo solitary spiritual transformation.
Finally, Foucault mentions the Philadelphia’s Walnut Street prison, which imposed a
daily regimen of mandatory work, along with frequent isolation, and the potentiality of
early release for good behavior. Walnut Street added a few elements to imprisonment
not seen before: the confined prisoner was removed from public view, dealt with entirely
by administrators, and seen as a source of knowledge. The latter meant that prison
administrators collected large case files about inmate behavior that became a
“permanent observatory that made it possible to distribute the varieties of vice or
weakness” (126).

Both the eighteenth century reformers and the prison models of the nineteenth century
sought to prevent the repetition of crime and to foster the rehabilitation of the criminal.
Yet the reformers sought to create an idea of punishment that would control the criminal,
and by extension the public. Conversely, the modern imprisonment controlled the “body
and the soul,” through the creation of a regimented system of daily activities. Thus the
“studied manipulation of the individual” took precedence over the former “art of
representation” (128).

Foucault concludes this section by summarizing the three “technologies of power,” each
representing a method of punishment that have we have seen thus far. The first was the
“ceremonial of sovereignty” during absolutism, where the body marked the vengeance
of the King. Foucault writes that the other two ways were “preventative, utilitarian,
corrective,” but in different ways (130); the first classified criminals as juridical subjects
through a system of signs that had a deterrent effect, and the second was a coercive
method of disciplinary control that subjected an inmate to reformative training. In the
next part of his study, Foucault will investigate why the latter became the dominant form
of punishment.

Analysis
This section is a continuation of the former section, in which Foucault introduced the
ideas that drove penal reform in the eighteenth century. Penal reformers encouraged
punishment as representation, the creation of a system of “obstacle-signs” that would
have a deterrent effect on the public. While Foucault presents this as the intermediary

18
stage between torture and discipline, it is important to note that the changes proposed
by the reformers never came into fruition. That considered, Foucault presents an
interesting distinction between idealized punishment of the late eighteenth century and
the disciplinary style of imprisonment that emerged in actuality from the nineteenth
century and has continued to the present day.

The “semio-technique” of punishment that the reformers proposed meant that crime was
to be discouraged through symbolic means, which functioned as a way to foster a
societal consciousness against criminality. In his description of the rules that embodied
this new form of punishment, Foucault emphasizes that punishment was refigured in
order to appear logically consequential to all: for example, if reformers thought that an
individual’s pride led to a crime, then the punishment should directly hurt the offender’s
pride. If a person steals property from someone, then their property will be taken away
from them. Sometimes the “obstacle-signs” were more literal; if an individual tried to
poison someone, then they will wear a shirt “decorated with snakes and other
venomous animals” (111). Regardless of the way that the sign manifested, the goal was
to make punishment symbolically unambiguous, a sign that could be “read” by
everyone.

Yet, even though Foucault spends time outlining the reformers’ rules for penal reform,
these reforms never happened – instead, incarceration almost immediately became the
dominant form of punishment. Torture disappeared and the semiotic system of
punishment imagined by the reformers was replaced by the prison. The rest of
Foucault’s study will trace why this is the case. The reason why Foucault is intrigued by
this move is because the prison was not a logical solution to the problems associated
with public executions and torture; if anything, incarceration left behind old problems
without resolving them in order to create new ones. This means that Foucault’s study
does not merely trace the history of reform - as we have seen, punishment has not
necessarily improved as a practice over time. In this way, Foucault rejects a teleological
view of history that things simply progressing for the better.

Foucault argues that the problem surrounding the emergence of the prison pertains to
the fact that there were several circumstances that should have prohibited its
development as the main form of punishment. In several respects, the disciplinary
method of the prison directly contrasted the ideals of the reformers; for instance, the
reformers insistence that punishment should be visible in order for the general
population to have a clear conception of its social function is rendered moot in the
prison system. Imprisonment also generalizes all forms of punishment which runs
counter to the eighteenth century notion that punishment must be individualized.
Foucault’s point, then, is that the prison germinated where it should not have.

While Foucault does not explicitly provide an explanation for why incarceration
developed against all odds, his schematic tracing of the way that power influences
bodies helps elucidate where he plans to take his study of punishment. He writes that
punishment was once associated with “the scaffold, where the body of the tortured
criminal” was a marker of the sovereign’s vengeance, was supposed to become “the
punitive theatre” in which the “representation of punishment was permanently available

19
to the social body” (115). Instead, punishment became “a great enclosed complex and
hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus,”
meaning the prison (116).

Here we can see that Foucault uses the metaphor of the body to explain the change:
there is a clear movement between the “tortured body” the “social body” of semiotic
punishment the body of the “state apparatus”. For Foucault, the changing “materiality” of
the body reflects the changing “physics of power” (116). In other words, Foucault views
the individual as a passive body with limited agency that is inscribed by power relations.
When France and the rest of Europe emerged out of absolutism, the failure of the
“social body” sought by reformers lead to larger, institutional bodies operating on
multiple levels of control based on increased knowledge of the prisoner. Thus for
Foucault, the changing implications of the body indicate the different ways that power
manifests over time – power rearranges itself according to the social system that
defines the era it is in.

Finally, it is important to note the way that power specifically manifests in the disciplinary
era. Foucault argues that power in the prison system operated with corrective and
coercive functions in mind. While the eighteenth century reformers believed in that
punishment should instill good habits and prevent repetition of the crime, the prison
system claimed to transform the individual “as a whole . . . of his body and habits by the
daily work that he is forced to perform, of his mind and his will by the spiritual attentions
that are paid to him” (125). This was to be achieved through a coercive “training” of the
body that imposed new habits and forms of behavior onto the prisoner. Foucault’s point
has serious implications for the modern prison system. Rather than make a criminal
amend their ways or “pay” for a crime, this corrective-coercive method attempts to
create a new individual whose main purpose is to be obedient as a subjected body.

Vocabulary
panoply, vainglory, obstinacy, calumniates, recompose, incorrigibles, lugubrious,
lineaments, multifarious, modulated, indeterminate, subsistence, exhortations,
dispositions, expiation, modalities

20
Section 3, Part 1
Summary
Foucault begins “Docile Bodies” with two opposing images of soldiers from different
eras. The seventeenth century soldier was characterized by virtues of strength and
courage, as well as a strong body and mannerisms that expressed his “rhetoric of
honour” (135). The other image is a soldier from the eighteenth century that is a
malleable figure of obedience. This soldier marks all of the features of discipline, in that
he acts in a calculated and efficient manner. The comparison between these two
soldiers indicates that the age of natural virtuosity was supplanted by a new age of
discipline, where the body is seen as an “object and target of power” (136).

Increasing industrialization of Europe brought with it the notion that the body can be
“manipulated” like a machine, that can be “shaped, trained, which obeys, responds,
becomes skillful and increases its forces” (136). Foucault identifies two trends that
contributed to this movement. The first, “the anatomico-metaphysical register” he
attributes to Descartes, was a move toward describing the mechanisms of the body, and
the second, “the technico-political register,” used methods for obedience seen in various
institutions to control bodies. Foucault concludes that this has made individuals subject
to analysis and manipulation that converged in an over-arching goal of widespread
docility. The body must first be made to conform, and then it can be used and
transformed.

Foucault writes that these “projects of docility” were new for three reasons. First, docility
targets people individually, rather than collectively. Second, the body was no longer a
representative means to be “read” but an efficient and economic force. Third, docility
renders the body subject to total coercive control, through supervision of an individual’s
time and space. These methods of controlling the body make up the “disciplines” that
imposed upon people a “relation of docility-utility” (137). While these disciplines existed
in monasteries and armies, it became a widespread form of domination in the
eighteenth century, a “political anatomy” which was a “mechanics of power” (138).

Next, Foucault describes the four aspects of discipline. The first, “The art of
distributions,” involves the organization of individuals in space. This is achieved through
enclosure in a closed space away from public view, such as military barracks, schools,
or factories. The point of enclosure is to keep masses in a contained space in order to
control labor production. Within the enclosed space, individuals are also partitioned into
small groups in order to be supervised more easily, and to discourage wandering off.
The spaces that people are in must also be economically utilitarian in a way that
maximizes worker efficiency. Additionally, spaces have ranks, in the sense that a
person’s value is determined by where they are within “serial space,” thus encouraging
them to become more efficient to move on up. All of these features create an approach
to space that is “architectural, functional, and hierarchical” (148).

21
The next element of discipline is the “control of activity,” which is the regulation of an
individual’s time – the first mechanism being the time-table. Emerging from
monasteries, the time-table ensured that time would be spent in the most efficient way
possible in order to guarantee the increased supervision of an individual and the
removal of distractions. Time is made useful through the “temporal elaboration of the
act,” which assigns a specific interval of time to a physical task. This leads to the
“correlation of the body and the gesture,” which means that discipline imposes a certain
mechanism of behavior that dictates the way that people comport their bodies, in terms
of how they position themselves and the gestures they make. This leads to “the body-
object articulation,” meaning that discipline controls the body’s relationship to the
objects it encounters; the body fuses its operations with that which it controls, such as a
gun or tool. Last, disciplinary time imposes a rule of “exhaustive use,” in that it would be
immoral and economically dishonest to waste time.

Combining the former elements of discipline, the third, “the organization of geneses”
pertains to the notion that an individual is made productive by controlling their time and
space through a pathway of progression. Foucault lists four ways this occurred. First,
time is divided into a series of successive activities that end at a set interval. Second,
these time-segments are analytically ordered with increasing difficulty. Third, each time-
segment ends with an examination by a supervisor that determines the individual’s rank
in relation to others. Fourth, the rank given to the individual dictates their
responsibilities, leading to the establishment of a “temporal series,” meaning different
classes of activities in relation to their role (159).

Finally, “the composition of forces,” refers to the creation of a large complex whole, a
“machine with many parts,” that all of these segments and groups serve to sustain
(163). This involves three aspects. One, the individual is rendered a part of the
machine, a “body-segment in a while ensemble” (164). Two, the time of each individual
must also operate in a regimented, machine-like way. Three, this machine-complex has
a system of commands in order to train the bodies to obey.

In the last pages of this section, Foucault summarizes some of his key points. He writes
that disciplinary techniques created four kinds of individuality: “cellular (spatial
distribution), organic (codes activities), genetic (accumulates time), and combinatory
(composition of forces)” (167). Foucault counters the idea that the eighteenth century
was solely a time of revolutionary ideals that envisioned a social utopia; instead, he
contends that the dominant turn was toward a “military dream of society” where
individuals were coerced into “meticulously subordinated cogs in a machine” (169). He
ends by quoting a French theoretician Comte de Guibert, who argued for a national
form of discipline, comparable to the Roman Empire’s dual status as both an ideal
republic and a militarized society.

Analysis
As is characteristic of Foucault, he begins “Docile Bodies” with a set of symbolic images
that set the “scene” for the argument that is to follow. He describes two archetypal

22
soldiers, one from the seventeenth century and one from the eighteenth, in order to set
up a juxtaposition in the reader’s mind that illustrates the emergence of the new
militarized individual. Yet, while he does not say it explicitly, Foucault fosters a
dichotomy between the natural and unnatural that functions as a way to understand his
disciplinary docility of the eighteenth century. He describes the first soldier in living,
naturalized terms: the soldier bore the “natural signs” of his virtues, he had a “lively and
erect manner,” and is described as gradually learning the “movements” of his profession
(135). In contrast, the eighteenth century soldier is described as a mechanical
automaton created out of “formless clay,” a “machine” that is constructed to adopt the
“air of a soldier” (135). Foucault conflates that which is natural with agency, which
seems to imply that humans have a nature that is independent of the society they are in.
Even though the eighteenth century soldier is molded by human actions, those actions
seem to have a power that supersedes the realm of the human, leading to a form of
contrived existence that is indissolubly linked to power.

Another important thing to note in this section is that the four aspects of discipline that
Foucault lists are closely aligned with Marxist thought – the influence of capitalism is
essential to Foucault’s argument in this section. In this vein, he writes that “discipline
increases the forces of the body” relegating the body’s agency into economic utility
(138). This means that any notion of human value is related to how much is produced of
economic value. Foucault insists that the “disciplinary coercion” of the eighteenth
century naturally results in “economic exploitation” (138). Foucault is referring to the
exploitative relationship between labor performed by the worker and the product they
produce, which generates profit for those in power, such as factory owners. This is a
key feature of Marx’s “theory of alienation,” which states that the capitalist mode of
production estranges the worker (the proletariat) from their own labor. The worker
becomes an instrument rather than an individual with their own intentions and purposes.
Discipline for Foucault, then, functions as a way to make workers docile enough to
enable this exploitative relationship to sustain itself.

While discipline seems to fuel the growth of capitalism, it did not emerge alongside it:
Foucault makes several claims that disciplinary methods existed before it was the
dominant form of modern social control, noting similarities between various institutions,
such as churches, schools, and the military. Yet, Foucault appears to reject that the new
disciplinary society stems from these institutions. He writes that eighteenth century
disciplinary control is unlike “monastic” discipline, which fostered obedience in order to
achieve a mastery over one’s body. While Foucault provides several examples of
disciplinary methods in schools and the military, particularly in the way that those
institutions create docility through control of time and space, his point is that the
disciplinary society he describes occurs on a much larger, more comprehensive scale.
This process is definitely economic, but also seems to extend to defining what it means
to be a human in general.

Foucault’s argument also exposes contradictions in the social consciousness regarding

discipline in the eighteenth century. In discussion of how individuals are given “ranks” to
create the idea that they are progressing, Foucault uses an example of a Jesuit school
that used Roman titles to rank the students against each other. He claims that during

23
the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire paradoxically became a contradictory symbol
with opposing aspects: “in its republican aspect, it was the very embodiment of liberty;
in its military aspect, it was the ideal schema of discipline” (146). Here we see once
again Foucault’s general contention that there is no pure notion of liberty, but only a
reorganization of the power relations that govern society. This also mirrors his assertion
that punishment has not become more humane, but rather sought to control people in a
more comprehensive way.

Another contradiction relates to Foucault’s larger point that knowledge is power: any
effort to attain knowledge or freedom contradictorily disciplines one into further docility.
In “the organization of geneses,” he uses the example of the Gobelins school, in order
to make his point that people are made productive through the idea of progress. In this
way, students have their time and identities segmented and ranked, respectively, in
order for a “transference of knowledge” from the teacher (156). Thus, while the students
undergo discipline in order to gain knowledge, that knowledge is then used against
them as a method of subordination.

Finally, Foucault’s claim at the end of the section that disciplinary techniques create four
types of individuality requires further explanation. The four types he lists would be better
understood as different methods of controlling a person, each one referring to a different
realm of existence. Thus, cellular means that a person can be controlled through space,
through containment in an enclosure and partitioning into small groups. Organic is about
the control of the body itself, in terms of the training in order to get it to operate like a
machine. Genetic refers to the control of an individual’s time through a regimented
schedule of activities. Combinatory means that collective identities are created through
tactical means; each smaller group ends up being self-disciplining that ultimately forms
a whole social body.

Foucault’s point here is that these are the ways that individuals end up being “cogs” in a
machine. This notion, albeit cynical, has two major philosophic implications. First, that
personal identity is an illusory concept that only serves the larger power structures.
Second, bourgeois society does not exist for everyone’s mutual benefit, but rather exists
to perpetually train people to be obedient citizens that only serve the larger system.

Vocabulary
automata, infinitesimal, codification, vassalage, renunciations, inextricability,
serializations, supersede, verminous, libertine, segmentation, injunction

24
Section 3, Part 2
Summary
Foucault begins “The means of correct training” by asserting that the main purpose of
discipline is to “train,” and in doing so, is capable of creating individuals by using them
as both “objects and as instruments of its exercise” (170). Compared to the grand
displays of absolutist power in past eras, modern discipline is modest about its control,
and yet quietly pervasive.

Disciplinary power works through three instruments. The first is “hierarchal observation,”
a method of coercion that works by keeping individuals under constant supervision. This
occurs through the creation of “observatories,” spaces where individuals can be seen at
all times. These observatories were modelled after military camps where the tents,
paths, and entrances were divided in precise geometrical terms for surveillance
purposes.

Foucault contends that the military distribution of space was a model for the layout of
“working-class housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools” (171). These
urban structures had embedded within them smaller spaces for easier observation of
individuals. Architectural features of school buildings reflected the increased prevalence
of surveillance of students, though the creation of sealed classrooms and platforms for
observation. These observatories “functioned like a microscope of conduct” that would
enable a “single gaze to see everything constantly” (173). While circular buildings were
preferred at this time to maximize visibility, they were insufficient for large industrial
facilities, leading to the creation of managerial positions whose sole purpose was to
oversee workers. Quoting from Marx, Foucault writes that this disciplinary supervision
had a distinct capitalistic function, in that it ensured that workers were more productive
in order to increase economic gain.

Surveillance operates as a disciplinary power not through a centralized body, but by

way of a “network of relations from top to bottom” and even “from bottom to top and
laterally” (176). Foucault likens this distribution to a machine that depends on everyone
functioning relationally as a part of the larger apparatus. Surveillance appears as a
more innocuous form of discipline because it does not use physical force but operates
through vision, a more nuanced form of control.

Next, Foucault writes that the ability to control individuals through vision works by way
of the second instrument of disciplinary power, namely, “normalizing judgment” (177).
This instrument uses surveillance as a way to judge an individual’s actions, through the
creation of “infra-penalties,” meaning a system of rewards and punishments specific to
the particular disciplinary body, rather than outside law. Discipline is also “corrective,” in
the sense that it uses light punishments and/or humiliation to get individuals to conform
to standards of behavior.

25
Foucault claims that this normalizing system works through several means. It compares
individuals to a whole, and yet it sets them apart based on whoever follows the rules. It
also operates via a “minimum threshold,” an average or optimal result that individuals
strive for, and uses numbers to rank and determine the “value” of individuals (183).
These factors help create a limit of action and behavior to encourage conformity;
individuals are discouraged from going beyond this limit in fear of being deemed
abnormal. In this way, disciplinary norms exercise their power through targeting
individual identity, rather than punishing individual acts.

Hierarchal observation and normalizing judgment converge in the “examination, which

“establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges
them” (184). In this way, the examination purports to be a measure of truth over an
individual’s capabilities; tests function as a way of classifying identity through their
results, and objectifying them through this very determination. In this way, knowledge is
used as a means of control, as an “epistemological thaw” (185).

After considering some examples, Foucault considers the ways that the examination
operates as a technique of power. First, he says that “the examination transformed the
economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). In other words, an individual
becomes subjected through being seen, which gives authorities power through their
right to judge. Second, the examination creates a plethora of “documentation,” in a
whole track record is created out of an individual’s failures and achievements, in relation
to the established norms. Further, the examination renders people as “cases,” objects of
knowledge to be “corrected, classified, normalized, [and] excluded (191).

During absolutism, individuality was a representation of power, but now the more people
are individualized, the more they are objectified; Foucault writes that those that have the
most information on them are the most vulnerable: children, and people with mental
illnesses. For this reason, Foucault writes that we need to stop thinking of power in
negative terms; power does not diminish or exclude, it “produces reality . . . and rituals
of truth” (194).

Analysis
In the previous section, Foucault argued that discipline turned individuals into docile
bodies that were obedient and useful in order to serve the industrial machinery of
power. In this section, he gets specific as to the way that this docility is imposed upon
people, namely the through observation and normalization.

Throughout this section, there is a tension between what is visible and what is unseen.
The modern “political anatomy” of power looks very different from the eras where
monarchs would put on excessive displays of their power, which would operate as a
means of solidifying its validity to the masses. This kind of sovereign power exerted its
control through its visibility. In contrast, the modern “machinery” of power operates in
the background, unseen in principle, but works by transferring that visibility to those it
subjugates. We can see this in Foucault’s discussion of how disciplinary power altered

26
the spaces we inhabit as a form of control, particularly how different spaces, such as
factories, schools, and military camps, were constructed to maximize visual access to
individuals. Foucault writes that the “physics of power . . . operates according to the
laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screes,
beams, degrees” but without physical violence (177). For Foucault, then, this new kind
of power works through the senses: without literally touching the body, it controls it
“optically” through sight, mentally playing on those it controls by operating in the
background.

In Foucault’s discussion regarding the “normalizing judgment,” it becomes evident that,

just like the shift from visible to invisible power, there is also a move from punishing
actions to inactions. More particularly, a distinctive feature of disciplinary power is “non-
observance,” meaning that power has moved from penalizing specific acts to a failure to
conform to set standards, or norms. This change illustrates that modern punishment is
more focused on reforming individuals by getting them to act in accordance with
standards of behavior. The example Foucault uses is that a soldier might receive a
penalty for failing to hold their rifle properly. Yet, what is unique about this is that it works
through psychological means to make individuals have the genuine desire to conform.
Foucault writes that the corrective aspects of punishment, systems of rewards and the
threat of humiliation, make it so that people want to act in the approved manner, not just
because they fear punishment, but because the punishment attacks their identity and
sense of belonging. Thus Foucault implies that this form of non-observance that targets
an individual’s sense of self, and their sense of normality, is a more effective means of
getting people to be obedient than prior penal tactics.

Foucault also argues that examinations, tests that determine a person’s value,
combined with the resulting documentation, is a way of using knowledge as a means of
control. This harkens back to Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge, in which power
reproduces knowledge not for its own sake, but as a means of using it against people.
Converging with the development of the human sciences in this period, such as
psychology, sociology, and anthropology, Foucault describes this new body of
knowledge about humans as an “epistemological thaw” (185). What he means by this is
that the deployment of power through knowledge about the minutia of human existence
occurred slowly through small developments, rather than through one big event.
Foucault shows, rather dramatically, that the wide scale production of truth (the human
sciences) and the assemblage of individual information is how disciplinary power
“manifests its potency” (187). This directly challenges the Enlightenment view that
knowledge can be obtained in a pure form that leads to the progression of humankind.

Finally, it is important to clarify where the modern pervasive power specifically comes
from. Prior to the eighteenth century, power was known to emerge from “top to bottom,”
meaning, from either an authoritative figure such as a monarch, or a group of
authorities, such as a republic-style government. But Foucault insists that this is not
solely the case anymore: he writes that “power became an ‘integrated’ system . . . a
network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top
and laterally” (176). What characterizes power in the modern era is that it is more like a
lattice than a pyramid; while there are people “at the top,” those people exist within a

27
series of interweaving networks between people underneath them, and so on. This
means that power is in the hands of more people, and that power varies in degrees
throughout society: in families, institutions like hospitals and schools, and the
workplace. Yet, this whole network is not determined consciously by a central body, but
still has an imposing rationality, which is why Foucault frequently refers to it in machine-
like terms. Ultimately, Foucault’s intention is to show how the “micro-physics of power”
has disseminated throughout our existence – in places beyond what we think of as the
realm of punishment.

Vocabulary
ostentation, calibration, penury, indissociable, admonitors, decurions, prolix, scriptuary,
historiography, collated, suzerainty

28
Section 3, Part 3
Summary
Foucault begins “Panopticism” with, once again, two contrasting images that
encapsulate two different ways of exercising power: the first is of a town that has been
wrought by the plague, and the second is a leper colony. The town with the plague
attempts to inhibit spread of the disease through strict partitioning; people are divided
into groups under the authority of a government official, who keeps them under watch.
These segmented people are subjected to inspection and observation, not only through
surveillance but also through records that detail who has been infected among the
groups. Foucault writes that “the plague of met by [the] order” of modern disciplinary
mechanisms (197). In contrast, people in leper colonies were separated and excluded in
a “mass,” rather than being partitioned into groups. Foucault concludes that the plague
town was marked by orderly confinement and knowledge gathering, while the leper
colony functioned through “rituals of exclusion” (198).

The two styles of dealing with these different diseases can be seen in the disciplinary
mechanisms of the nineteenth century. Namely, Foucault contends that institutions at
this time, such as psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and schools, partitioned individuals,
characterized them through evaluations, and deeming them “abnormal,” excluded them
from society.

The ultimate example of this, Foucault claims, is Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a privatized
prison - the Panopticon. Foucault describes Bentham’s plan for the architecture of the
Panopticon, which was to be a circular building with a watchtower in its center. The
perimeter wall of the building is divided into cells with windows that allow light to flow in,
so that individuals can be seen from everywhere. A guard will sit in the tower, and be
able to observe inmates even if they cannot see them due to the shadows. Regular
prisons enclose inmates and keep them out of sight, but the Panopticon encloses them
in full view of an observer – visibility thus, becomes “a trap” (200).

Foucault writes that the “major effect of the Panopticon [is to] induce in the inmate a
state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power” (201). This means that, even if they were not watched, the prisoner would self-
regulate their behavior in fear of being caught. Another feature of the Panopticon was its
penchant for the attainment of knowledge through observation and classification of
inmates. It could use this knowledge to carry out experiments on inmates in attempts to
“correct” them. Even though Foucault began this section by comparing a plague-
stricken town with the Panopticon, he writes that the differences between them are
significant: while the disciplinary mechanism employed during the plague was due to
extreme circumstances, the Panopticon’s disciplinary methods were to define “the
everyday life of men” (205).

29
The model of the Panopticon was created by Bentham in order to be applied to many
institutions throughout society to make power cheaper and more effective. Foucault
writes that it was figured as a positive arrangement of power, as its “aim was to
strengthen social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread
education, [and] raise the level of public morality” (208).

Foucault identifies three practices that characterize the “Benthamite physics of power”
(209). One, “the functional inversion of the disciplines,” means that disciplinary
institutions aimed to operate in a “positive role” (210); rather than eliminate criminality,
they aim to create people that were more useful to society as a whole. Two, “the
swarming of disciplinary mechanisms,” throughout society means that all institutions
begin to act like each other, creating a more widespread grid of surveillance. These
institutions are not closed off anymore, but they extend into the home, and the lives of
people. Three, “the state-control of the mechanisms of discipline,” involves the
establishment of a “centralized police” that becomes involved with these disciplinary
institutions in order to have wider reach over the population. Discipline cannot be tied to
one institution or apparatus, but is weaved into the social body.

Next, Foucault connects the establishment of disciplinary society with a number of

historical processes. The first process is economic - he writes that the “disciplines are
techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities,” at the lowest cost. A
growing population and increasing capitalist production meant that there was a need to
organize larger masses of people than ever before, particularly in order to reduce
inefficiency. Another aim was to ensure that a “counter-power,” or resistance, did not
emerge, especially among lower classes (219); this is why the disciplines had to both
partition people into groups and yet increase the efficiency of these groups. Next, he
traces the “juridico-political” process to the rise of the bourgeoisie, arguing that this
occurred due to the disciplines, which “hide” behind a pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric that
promoted equal liberties. The last historical process Foucault mentions is the rise of the
sciences, which allowed the combination of disciplinary methods to converge with the
rise of civil society and a capitalist economy. Foucault concludes by writing that what
characterizes punishment today is its status as “an indefinite discipline,” an amalgam of
different fields that are supposed to “cure” individuals, but ultimately culminates in an
investigation that never ends. Foucault implies that it is not surprising that all social
institutions resemble prisons.

Analysis
In this section, Foucault describes English philosopher and prison reformer Jeremy
Bentham’s architectural design for the Panopticon, the template he designed in 1791 for
a structure that is representative of the height of institutional order. While the project
was never specifically built (although variations of it do exist), Foucault uses it as a
symbol, as “diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (205). As a
tangible example of the exercise of power, Foucault uses the Panopticon as a way of
putting into practice the outline of disciplinary power he sketched out in the previous
section.

30
As described, the structure enables individuals to be completely in view of an observer
– this is a combination of its structural features and the introduction of a group of
personnel whose sole purpose is to oversee inmates. Yet, the point is not to observe an
individual at every possible moment, but to create the impression in their mind that that
is occurring: Foucault writes that the Panopticon enabled power to be “visible and
unverifiable” (201). The ability of power to be “visible” implies more than the mere sense
impression of sight; rather, it connotes a whole experience of existing based on being
watched. That power should be “unverifiable,” meaning that the inmate can never be
sure that they are being watched, adds an element of fear that stems out of uncertainty,
not ever knowing who and if they are watching. The mere possibility of being watched is
enough to prevent them from breaking the rules of the prison. Thus, this form of
disciplinary power is able to internalize an external influence: psychological habits
become formed in an individual out of sheer potentiality.

This extreme ability of modern power to control its individuals produces a contradiction
of terms: in Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon, the inmate has a simultaneous status
of being both a subject and an object. Namely, a stark difference between power
exercised under absolutism and the modern disciplinary methods is that the individual
becomes complicit in their own oppression. Foucault writes that the individual being
watched “inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both
roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (202-3). In this sense, the
individual is both oppressor and oppressed; the power of the Panopticon works because
the exercise of power relies upon the inmate’s subjective awareness that they are being
watched. Hence, the inmate is both an object, a “cog” in the machine to be observed
and used, and a subject upon which the impressions of power work. Arguably, this is an
erroneous characterization to make - the inmate has no choice to be complicit, and
would suffer consequences by breaking the rules. However, Foucault’s point here is to
emphasize the way that non-corporeal, non-violent power works on the mind, to the
extent that an inmate has no choice but to concede to such a power dynamic.

Foucault writes that the aim of the Panopticon is not to merely to make people be seen
and induce fear in them, but rather that they are consequences of a power whose main
aim is to function is to order and sort humans. The Panopticon was, then, was imagined
not just as an all-seeing machine, but as a means of arranging people into social
categories so that they can be controlled and understood. To see, then, is not for its own
sake, but to transform people into objects to be dissected, isolated, and assigned roles.
This is how power leads to knowledge, which was used to increase the utility out of an
“organized multiplicity” of individuals at the lowest possible economic cost. Again, we
return to Marx – citing from The Capital, Foucault insists that capitalist production and
disciplinary techniques directly sustain each other.

It is important to note that Foucault’s discussion on the historical processes challenges

our conceptions of social and economic freedoms – particularly the developments that
led our modern democratic society. Even though a lot of Marxist critique makes the
point that capitalism is exploitative, Foucault takes it further and implies that the
capitalist economy led to the spread of disciplinary power across society as a whole. He
writes that “the growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to a specific modality of

31
disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and
bodies . . . could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses, or
institutions” (221). As capitalist production grows, the need for controlling larger portions
of the population increases, and the methods of this control extend beyond the industrial
facility.

Foucault supplements this point by arguing that the post-Revolutionary rise of the
bourgeoisie coincided with an increased rhetoric about civil rights, particularly with the
establishment of a court system that purported equal rights for all under the law. In this
sense, “the Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines
(222). For Foucault, the establishment of a democratic society operates under a
pretense of equality whose underlying goal is to make people obedient in ways were
never seen before. An example of this would be in the growth of bureaucracy; even
though there is more accountability across personnel, meaning that no single individual
could implement a policy without agreement on several levels, people are forced to go
through many regulatory hoops in order to get something done. While power is
distributed more evenly among the classes, that distribution brings with it a more
extensive network of discipline that enforces obedience on many levels. Ultimately,
Foucault contends that society is not necessarily progressing for the better for all, it is
just reworking its tactics for the sake of efficiency, and thus, control.

Vocabulary
syndic, envisaged, annular, axial, dyad, miasmas, polyvalent, efficacity, seigniorial,
insidiously, schemata, modality, egalitarian, infinitesimal, agronomical, asymptotic

32
Section 4, Part 1
Summary
In this section, “Complete and austere institutions,” Foucault returns to the subject of the
prison. While prisons became the main apparatus of punishment in the early nineteenth
century, they were not innovative institutions. Namely, Foucault writes that prison
models such as the one at Ghent and the Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia, were not
“new” in penal history. What was new was that the rising middle-class conceived of
justice as representing the principle of equality, but it actually contained the covert
mechanisms of “disciplinary subjection,” which already existed in society (232).

When the prison became the dominant form of punishment in the eighteenth century, it
appeared as a “natural” and “self-evident” development. Foucault argues that the feeling
that imprisonment was a rational move reflects the dominance of the middle-class, who
propagated an idea of individual liberty as the benchmark of equality. The prison, then,
seemed a natural punishment as something that directly took away liberty through
confinement. Along with the rise of capitalism, there was a new value being placed on
an individual’s time; since a person’s time would be exchanged for wages in the
workplace, taking away a prisoner’s time to participate in the economic market was
newly seen as an appropriate form of punishment. The prison also seemed rational
because it functioned “as an apparatus for transforming individuals (233). In this sense,
the goal of imprisonment is not just to make prisoners pay reparations in the form of
denied liberty and borrowed time, but to reform them to better fit into the norms of
society.

Foucault writes that the prison took control over every aspect of a person: “his physical
training, his aptitude to work, his everyday conduct, his moral attitude, his state of mind”
(235). The prison, then, was able to achieve complete subjugation over its prisoners; in
these respect, prison architect Louis-Pierre Baltard referred to prisons as “complete and
austere institutions” (235).

The modern prison contained expressed three principles in its operation. The first was
isolation of the prisoner – not only from the outside world, but from other prisoners as
well. While the aim of isolation was to prevent collusion with other prisoners, it was also
to force the prisoner to reflect on their crime, and thus foster remorse through solitude.
The main purpose of isolation, however, was to solidify the force of the power over the
individual. In reality, isolation was modelled predominantly after two American prisons;
the Auburn prison in New York allowed prisoners to eat in common, but they could only
speak to administrators of the prison, while the Philadelphia model kept inmates in
complete isolation. While there were several debates regarding which was the best
model, Foucault writes that the primary purpose of isolation was “coercive
individualization,” enforcing a relationship between inmate and guard solely based on
power (239).

33
The second principle of the prison is work – along with isolation, prison labor is a part of
the prison’s mandate to transform its inmates. Foucault writes that there were several
debates regarding the nature of the labor, particularly whether prisoners should be paid
for their work. There were concerns that remuneration would not necessarily lead to the
moral reformation of the individual. Additionally, regular workers outside of the prison
were concerned that the low cost of prison labor would fail to make them competitive in
the market. Prisoners were also seen to have the unfair advantage of having their food
and rent secured. Prison administrators were unsympathetic to these concerns,
claiming that prison labor has a positive effect “on the human mechanism” in that it
imposes “[principles] of order and regularity,” making inmates more amenable to power
(242)., Foucault likewise argues that the purpose of penal work was not to take
advantage of cheap labor, or to teach prisoners a skill, but to exert power over them.

The last principle of punishment is that the prison is a “modulation of the penalty,”
meaning that the sentence can be altered based on the prisoner’s behavior (244). This
feature shifts power from the legal system to prison administrators, who in turn judge an
inmate’s value based on observation and information-gathering.

Foucault thus describes the modern prison as a “penitentiary,” a place where

disciplinary techniques converge with the act of detention. The key feature of the
penitentiary is the “infinite labyrinth” of knowledge about its inmates – their personalities,
behavior, moral character, and so on. Consequently, a criminal offender in court
becomes a delinquent in the penitentiary – an “object” to be known, leading to the
classification of the different kinds of criminal personalities (252-3). Prior to the
penitentiary, criminals were seen as either socially abnormal “monsters” or a “juridical
subject” successfully reformed by imprisonment (256). The new figure of the delinquent
makes it possible to combine these two views, both as an offender of the law and an
object of science, toward some notion of overarching truth.

Analysis
This section marks the emergence of the paradigmatic symbol of disciplinary society –
the prison. Yet, even though Part Four signals the beginning of Foucault’s discussion on
the prison, the main point he makes is that certain features of the prison were already
ingrained in society. Prisons only developed when the mechanisms for the creation of
docile bodies were already in place, which is what made them seem “natural” when they
became the norm. Foucault’s account of the prison begins with the French penal codes
of 1808 and 1810, which stipulated that incarceration should deprive individuals of their
freedom, and “transform” them.

One of the reasons that the prison seemed like a natural development in the nineteenth
century is that it targeted the main axioms of the French Revolution, and by extension
democratic society – equality and liberty. In this vein, Foucault asks: “how could prison
not be the penalty par excellence in a society in which liberty is a good that belongs to
all in the same way and to which each individual is attached . . . by a ‘universal and
constant’ feeling?” (232). Of course, it is easy to detect a sense of irony in Foucault’s

34
question; it appears paradoxical that a society that purports to be egalitarian would be
so quick to attack that very principle. This kind of punishment appears to be more
humane because it does not directly hurt the body, but it still controls it through more
covert means. This supports Foucault’s notion that punishment reflects the political
purposes of the society that implements it - the “deprivation of liberty,” then, is only a
natural consequence of a new way to control societal deviants. Beyond this, the
creation of docile bodies during incarceration extends beyond the confines of the prison,
by way of normalizing a power hierarchy whose disciplinary mechanisms will become
familiar in other societal institutions, such as schools and the workplace.

Foucault also writes that prison sought to engage in the “technical transformation of
individuals,” the circumstances of which were already in place by the early nineteenth
century (233). The intention of this transformation is not merely to produce the sorts of
bodies that would be able to function in society post-incarceration, but to create “people”
by defining their subjectivity. Foucault makes this point when he explains how the
penitentiary created the “delinquent.” He writes that the development of the delinquent
is shown in a “biographical investigation . . . [which] establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing
before the crime and even outside it” (252). An example of this is the creation of the
criminal as an object of study, the delinquent as archetype, which can be explained by a
specific set of psychological and social circumstances. In this sense, the prison creates
an idea of a delinquent, who, hereditarily and circumstantially, cannot help commit the
crime that they end up committing. The prison, then, creates and produces knowledge
about the delinquent simultaneously, which ends up categorizing people as having a
delinquent nature.

The three principles that governed the new penitentiary – isolation, labor, and the
modulation of the penalty – may have their stated purposes, but Foucault points out that
they all really serve to reinforce the larger power structures. In terms of isolation, the
point mainly was to induce reflection and remorse that would function as a form of moral
rehabilitation. But Foucault suggests that the real reason for isolation was that it was
just another form of coercion; he writes that “solitude is the primary condition of total
submission” (237). For Foucault, the intensity of prolonged isolation serves to create a
vulnerable psychological state in the prisoner where they become directly dependent
and thus to submissive to their only influence – in this case, a prison administrator.

In the same way, the real purpose of prison labor is not for the betterment of the
inmates; instead it reflects “the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic
form, a schema of individual submission, and of adjustment to a production apparatus”
(243). Like with isolation, Foucault argues that the regularity of work gets individuals to
easily adjust and thus more readily conform to the power that controls them. The last
principle, “the modulation of penalty,” is the most clearly the means of producing
disciplined bodies: it is not a sign of amnesty on the part of prison administrators, but is
rather driven by how closely the prisoner, as an object to be transformed, has reformed
in terms of prison standards.

For Foucault, modern power paradoxically creates individuals in order to eliminate any
real sort of individuality. The hidden agendas of power that covertly influence the three

35
principles of the prison serve to illustrate Foucault’s overarching point that institutions
exert control through the creation of docile bodies, which in turn forms certain types of
human beings that do not resist their place in the lower ranks of the power hierarchy.

Vocabulary
panoply, prolix, inert, malefactors, dissimulation, sepulchre, intemperate, expiation,
carceral, pernicious, iniquitous, inept, superimposed

36
Section 4, Part 2
Summary
Foucault begins the section entitled, “Illegalities and delinquency” with the contention
that incarceration is not just a denial of liberty, but a “technical project,” a disciplinary
and reformative mechanism. The symbol that indicates the transition between public
executions and the modern penal system is the 1837 replacement of the chain-gang
with the police carriage. The processional nature of the chain-gang made it a public
spectacle, which became difficult for the police to control due to the disorderliness of
observers. Prisoners in the chain-gang began to develop popular support from
spectators for providing a “symbolic outlet” for the lower classes to express their
resentment toward authorities (262). Consequently, the chain-gang was replaced by a
police carriage, “a moving prison,” where the prisoners could be observed by
administrators, just like the Panopticon (263).

Bizarrely, the development of the prison does not follow a linear chronology; despite its
prevalence by the nineteenth century, it was considered a failure and received many
criticisms. One complaint is that prisons do not deter crime, but actually increase the
variety of crimes committed. Prisons also increase the propensity of the criminal to
reoffend, particularly because it fosters a feeling of resentment toward prison authority
and the justice system in general. Recidivism is common because it is challenging for
an individual post-incarceration to shed their status as a delinquent, and reintegrate
back into society.

Despite these criticisms, the prison remained unchanged, even posing as its “own
remedy” (268). Moving to the twentieth century, Foucault writes that after the French
prison revolts in the 1970s, a set of “maxims” were established that were to guide prison
conditions. Namely, prison must be corrective; it must classify inmates according to their
crime and modulate the sentence based on behavior; work and education must be
available; finally, prisoners should be supervised by people of moral character, and they
should be assisted with readjustment to society post-incarceration. Foucault contends
that no real change has resulted from these principles.

Foucault writes that we need to see punishment as “a simultaneous system” rather than
a linear development between successive stages, and identifies four elements related to
it. One is that the prison is a ‘super-power,’; two, it is a force that produces “auxiliary
knowledge,” a body of facts about criminals; three, “inverted efficiency,” namely, the
production of delinquents rather than the elimination of them; and four, “utopian
duplication,” the denial of reform due to the perpetual rehashing of disciplinary
mechanisms (271).

Next, Foucault suggests that the goal of prison is not to reduce crimes, “but rather to
distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them . . . in a general tactics of subjection”
(272). The reason for this is that it serves to affirm the domination of the middle-class.

37
Eighteenth century penal reform was driven by “the struggle against illegalities,” where
things tolerated under the monarchy were now more strictly penalized. Foucault
characterizes the new kinds of popular illegality in three ways. First, there is a political
element to popular illegalities, as seen in the refusal to pay taxes or in confrontations
with authorities. In this way, these new illegalities were a form of political resistance.
Second, popular illegalities are a way for the lower classes to resist the domination of
the middle class’s control of justice and the market. Third, criminality became more
“specialized,” in that new groups of people came together to commit offences that they
would not have prior to this period.

Consequently, there was a new “class dissymmetry” to punishment (276); crime was
now mostly committed by lower classes, whom the middle class began to view as
“barbaric” and “immoral” (275). Foucault argues that the middle-class fostered
delinquency as a way of controlling political illegalities. The prison, then, does not deter
crime, but produces a specific type of delinquent crime that is less dangerous and more
controllable. The prison creates this particular type of delinquency (rather than
eliminating it) in order to, once again, serve the interests of the dominant class.
Delinquents can also work as informers, as another way of controlling “the illegality of
dominant groups,” such as the insertion of prostitution in lower class neighborhoods.
(279). In this way, illegality becomes profitable for the dominant class. This creates a
tripartite loop where “police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, the prison
transforms them into delinquents,” which are again targeted by “police supervisions,”
and sent back to prison (282).

Resistance against the police-prison-delinquency system occurred in the form of a

reversal of the middle-class dialogue; the working class newspapers blamed
delinquency not on the criminal, but on society. At this point, criminal trials became a
means of political commentary, and people began to blame social inequality for the
criminality of the lower classes. Foucault connects this to critique hedged by nineteenth
century anarchists, who attempted to “disentangle delinquency from the bourgeois
legality and illegality that colonized it” (292).

Analysis
In this section, Foucault makes stark claims about the prison that may seem
contradictory to the common view of the penal system. Foucault’s main point has two
aspects: not only does the prison operate strategically, in accordance with goals not
declared openly, but the end-goal of that strategy is not to rehabilitate offenders, but to
create delinquents. For Foucault, what one would think would be the aims of prison,
such as it being as a means of protecting society from criminals while rehabilitating
them, are eclipsed by the fact that the prison encourages criminality in covert ways.

Foucault argues that the reason that the prison persists despite its failures is because
the social classes that have more power, such as the rich bourgeoisie, government
officials, and the police, derive advantages from the prison as a penal institution. While
in the previous section Foucault depicted the delinquent as a classifiable object capable

38
of reform, here he shows how the delinquent functions as an important tool for social
and political control. For instance, police legitimize their surveillance of delinquents by
labelling them as such; this gives the police leeway to maintain a whole social group in
their control, which is why Foucault writes that “delinquency functions as a political
observatory” (281). Prisons, then, create delinquency as a type of illegality that is
politically less dangerous than uncontrolled illegality, such as a large scale revolution. In
this way, the delinquent becomes a necessary means for disciplinary power.

Delinquency is able to play a central role in subjection of the masses because it relies
on definition and division. Criminal offenders become delinquents when they are turned
into case-studies of abnormality, defined by a body of knowledge gathered by
authorities. This enables the creation of the distinction between a delinquent and a
regular working-class individual, thereby dominating a large social class through
division: the lower class cannot gain enough force to successfully resist the middle-
class if they are divided into smaller, controllable groups. The result is a practically
mythological delinquent, a “faceless enemy” that keeps the working-class in perpetual
fear of something separate and alien to them.

Control through division is also seen through a certain type of tolerated illegality, where
the emergence of a “dominant illegality” can only occur through the repression of lower
class illegalities (285). This “tolerated” illegality of the delinquent is useful, in the sense
that it can be managed and controlled while remaining profitable. The illegalities of the
delinquent, such as prostitution, or the trafficking of illicit goods through the black
market, rely on governance by prison administrators (while offender is in prison) and
police (when the delinquent is out of prison, running these crimes). Foucault’s point is
that certain members of the more privileged class can delineate a series of crimes that
can be controlled and exploited.

As Foucault describes the divisions of delinquency and illegalities, it is easy to get the
impression of a grim situation that is ultimately intractable. However, in the latter part of
this section, he writes that resistance occurred and to some degree, was successful. He
writes that despite these strategies of dividing the working-class, a “total break between
the delinquents and the lower classes” was not achieved (287). The proliferation of
working-class newspapers allowed for a pushback against the police-prison-
delinquency system, leading to the recognition that crimes committed by ordinary
people were induced by “exploiters [that] plunge them and who, literally, starve and
murder them” (288). Attention was thus shifted from a microcosm to a macrocosm of
causality: the forces to blame were the bourgeoisie, and even civilization in general.

The resistance that Foucault describes depends on the principle of inversion: instead of
resistance in the form of political revolution, the rhetoric propagated by the middle-class
was turned back against them. The example that Foucault provides about the vagabond
Béasse demonstrates the principle of inversion in action, locating freedom through
negation. Foucault describes this in the following way: “all the illegalities that the court
defined as offences the accused reformulated as the affirmation of a living force: the
lack of a home as vagabondage, the lack of a master as independence, the lack of work
as freedom, the lack of a time-table as the fullness of days and nights” (290). Here,

39
Béasse’s power emerges in this “lack” – what the authorities tried to depict as criminal
was redefined on the same terms. Resistance, then, depends upon reverting what
Foucault depicts as an arbitrary system of meaning-making that is dependent on a
definition of order defined by those in power.

Thus, effective critique and change occurs not in extremes but in reversals of the same
tactics. In his discussion of the nineteenth century anarchists, Foucault suggests that
they were right to “disentangle” delinquency from the middle-class through “structural
critique,” rather than pushing forward a romanticized view of the criminal in order to
push back against the establishment. Interestingly, Foucault locates resistance in
language, through the processes of deconstructing and inverting the terms that define
society.

Vocabulary
nullified, invective, phrenology, semiologies, saturnalia, salutary, recidivism, inveighs,
mitigation, meted, milieu, prevaricating, complicities, aesthetes, neophyte, polemic

40
Section 4, Part 3
Summary
Foucault begins the fourth and final section of his study with the claim that if he had to
choose a year when the carceral system was fully implemented, he would choose 1840,
the opening of Mettray, a juvenile detention center. He writes that he chooses this event
because it embodies the “disciplinary form at its most extreme,” with its partitioning in
hierarchized groups, comprehensive surveillance, isolation, along with a strict work and
school schedule (293). The authorities at Mettray were “technicians of behavior” that
fostered the creation of docile and useful bodies through comprehensive information
gathering and other disciplinary techniques. What was unique about Mettray was that
the young inmates would be subject to apprenticeships so that they could later become
instructors in the same disciplinary mechanisms they experienced.

Thus, Foucault writes that Mettray “marked a new era” through its “normalization of the
power of normalization, in the arrangement of a power-knowledge over individuals”
(296). Mettray is the paradigm of the “carceral archipelago,” Foucault’s term for the
expanse of disciplinary institutions that govern society. It marks the expansion of the
penal system to all realms of life where authorities police people outside of the prison,
and seek to monitor even the potentiality of the slightest irregularity.

Foucault identifies six consequences of the spread of the carceral system. First, the
large network of observational institutions made it that the distinction between slight
misdemeanors and serious crimes collapsed; a minute departure from the norm could
render one a social enemy that needed to be subjected to institutional discipline.
Second, the proliferation of these institutions meant that any marker of abnormality
could make an individual live a life of discipline, “an institutional product that is shuffled
to and from a web of institutions” (301); in this sense, a person could be transferred
from an orphanage to a poorhouse to a mental institution. Third, the spread carceral
system normalizes and legitimizes itself in its wide reach of power. It achieves this effect
through two registers, one of legal justice and the other of extra-legal discipline, that
make disciplinary mechanisms outside of the prison seem normal because they reflect
each other.

Next, the carceral allowed a new type of law that was a combination of legal and natural
processes to constitute a new norm (304). The result of this is that judges turned their
attention to rehabilitation. The intent was to cure abnormal individuals through theories
from fields of medicine and psychology in order to make them fit into an idea of
normality. The fifth consequence is that the carceral society guarantees the “capture”
and “perpetual observation” of the body with the goal of making people useful and
obedient (304). Foucault here links these observational tactics to the establishment of
the human sciences, with the goal of creating a human being that is entirely knowable in
all respects. The last consequence is that the normalization of power-knowledge in
society makes it unlikely that the carceral system will ever change.

41
Foucault writes that there are two processes that could potentially restrain prisons. The
first is anything that reduces the utility of delinquency as a convenient illegality. The
second process is the growth of disciplinary domains outside of the prison, such as
medicine, psychology, education, and public assistance (306). The prison becomes a
less important disciplinary institution when the normalizing mechanisms involved are
being applied throughout society.

Foucault ends Discipline and Punish with an excerpt with an 1836 passage from “La
Phalange,” a French political journal. The passage criticizes the middle-class vision of
society with its spread of carceral institutions that breeds destitution, corruption, and
social inequality, creating a “ruthless war of all against all” (307). Foucault concludes by
writing that his study of punishment will hopefully serve as an impetus of future study on
the “power of normalization and the formation of knowledge” as it stands in modern
society” (308).

Analysis
In this final section of Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses the image of the “carceral
archipelago” as a way of summarizing his project and extracting his final points. The
term itself most likely refers to a historical text written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called
The Gulag Archipelago, which depicted the conditions in Soviet-era labor camps; the
term “archipelago,” which means a group of islands in the same area, was used by
Solzhenitsyn to describe the network of prison-camp systems during the Soviet Union.
For Foucault, this term encapsulates the expanse disciplinary techniques across
society, beyond simply the prison.

Foucault asserts that the prison managed to expand its reach in a paradoxical way that
made itself as an institution less relevant. This principle, what Foucault calls “extra-
penal incarceration,” expresses a contradiction of the rhetoric being espoused at the
time; on one hand, legislators insisted that everyone would be subject to equal
punishment under the law by an established judicial court, but on the other, penitentiary
techniques proliferated in all social realms well beyond the legal system. Institutions
such as orphanages and penal colonies kept their charges under strict discipline and
trained them to do physically difficult work. The way that Foucault depicts these
vulnerable and often young people is that they were deemed abnormal and even
inherently immoral and thus adopted a series of mechanisms that would end up
controlling their lives, with little hope of emerging out of these systems.

Foucault’s examination of the carceal system reveals that society is not governed by
laws, as one would expect, but by norms. As he points out in the fourth consequence,
“we are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the
‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based”
(304). We are inclined to view people in these occupations as providing services for the
betterment of society, but Foucault implies the opposite: that these professions serve
the normalization of power-knowledge, which is not necessarily in the interests of
individuals that make up the social body. It is not Foucault’s intent to suggest that

42
doctors, teachers, etc. have bad intentions, but rather that they are pawns in a
hierarchal system whose structure demands that they serve this disciplinary
normalization. An individual that cannot maintain standards of normalcy is quickly
absorbed into this network of institutions. Even in the modern court system, the power
to punish begins to appear “natural” and therefore “legitimate,” only because people are
already familiar with this type of power in their daily lives.

Foucault does write that despite its web of influence, the carceral system can be
altered. Yet the two processes he suggests that would weaken the power structures
both suggest an expansion of power rather than a weakening of it. The first process
involves weakening delinquency through the integration of its process to benefit the
larger “political and economic apparatuses”. Foucault uses prostitution as an example,
arguing that it will become less a matter of hierarchal delinquency when the state
integrates “sexual pleasure” into the system for profit, through the “sale of
contraceptives” and the sale of pornographic material” (306). The second process he
covers articulates the idea that imprisonment will become less of a deterrent because
such controlling normalization already exists everywhere. While these two processes
would surely alter the carceral system, they insidiously suggest that power can only
restructure and become more ambiguous but increasingly prevalent. Certain acts may
become less punishable due to normalization, in the sense that people would not be
incarcerated for committing them, but not because society has become more lenient
and equitable; rather, the systems of power only change when something is to their
advantage. These potential restraints on the prison then, would not foster a less punitive
and normalizing society.

Despite this, Foucault’s final passage from “La Phalange” indicates that the ‘battle”
against disciplinary society is not over, so to speak. He writes that the “carceral city” is
the product of “complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple
mechanisms of ‘incarceration’, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements
for this strategy” (308). While society is not as free as most of us are inclined to think,
perhaps awareness of these structures can foster an impetus for change.

Vocabulary
carceral, parapenal, archipelago, precocity, gradation, nomad, chimerical, prescription,
inertia

43
Important People
Michel Foucault
Born in 1926, Michel Foucault is a French philosopher and social theorist that is known
for the ways that power manifests in society, particularly in terms of his relationship to
knowledge. He is known as a part of a group of 20th century French intellectuals, and is
associated with the structuralist and post structuralist movements. Much of Foucault’s
theory covers the way that power structures target those especially vulnerable in
society, such as prisoners and people in psychiatric institutions. Foucault’s work often
engages in a “history of the present,” a historical investigation of why things are the way
they are, and the philosophical implications of the way that society is structured. His
books cover a wide range of topics, ranging from sexuality to the history of conceptions
of knowledge. Foucault is also known for rejecting the idea of innate universal concepts,
such as free will or justice.

Foucault was also known for his political and social activism, and participated in in a
number of left-wing groups during the 1970s, which was a tense time in French politics.
He was an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia. He also worked
as a lecturer, and held a teaching job in psychology. Foucault died from AIDS in Paris in
1984.

Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham is an English eighteenth century philosopher and social theorist,
primarily known as the founder of utilitarian ethics. Bentham was also a prominent
advocate for civil freedoms, and contributed widely to legal and social reform. His plan
for the Panopticon, an institutional observatory meant to take on the form of a national
prison, was composed over several years and was intended to become a reality;
however, it never came into fruition. Foucault uses Bentham's plan for the Panopticon
as the ideal representation of disciplinary punishment.

Cesare Beccaria
Cesare Beccaria is an eighteenth century Italian criminologist, most famous for writing
On Crimes and Punishments, a monograph condemning the practice of torture and
public executions. Though now primarily known for producing foundational work on
penal theory, Foucault refers to him as an example of one of the "great" reformers, citing
him frequently in his discussion of the proposed penal reforms in the eighteenth century.

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Robert-François Damiens
Robert-François Damiens is a domestic servant known for his attempted assassination
of King Louis XV of France in 1757. Discipline and Punish opens with a graphic
description of Damiens' execution, the description of which subsequently served to the
larger public as a symbolic example of the cruelty of absolutist regimes. Foucault cites a
newspaper account of Damiens' execution as a representation of the drastic shift that
took place between the era of torture and the disciplinary society that followed only
about a century later.

Léon Faucher
Léon Faucher is a nineteenth century French politician and penal reformer. Foucault
cites an excerpt from a book written by Faucher in 1838, which is a description of a daily
timetable for prisoners. Foucault uses Faucher's account as a counter-example to
Damiens' execution, an indication of how drastically punishment changed over a
relatively short period of time. Faucher's account gives an impression of the strict
disciplinary style that was to emerge in modernity.

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Objects/Places
France
Foucault's discussion of the history of punishment is mostly centered around France.
His commentary on "supplice," the style of punishment that involved public executions
and torture, derives from accounts under the Ancien Régime, the French absolutist
government that lasted from the fifteenth century to 1789, the start of the French
Revolution. Foucault's depiction of modern disciplinary society also focuses on France.
The rise of the middle-class and the efforts of the penal reformers are couched in
French society.

The scaffold
The scaffold, the elevated wooden platform upon which criminals would be executed,
symbolizes the era of torture for pre-revolutionary punishment. With its visibility in public
spaces, the scaffold is a figurative representation of the monarch's power to commit
revenge on its subjects. Foucault often writes of the "spectacle" of executions on the
scaffold, contending that it heightened the intensity of punishment by becoming the
symbolic threshold "between the judgement of men and the judgment of God" (46).

The prison
With the termination of corporeal punishment in the latter half of the eighteenth century,
the prison emerged as the dominant method of punishment. As Foucault emphasizes
throughout his study, the prison had aims other than just forced containment of the
criminal: the physical space of the prison also became the place for moral rehabilitation
of the prisoner, and the creation of docile bodies amenable to obedience. Yet, Foucault
shows how the prison itself is not unique - we see its disciplinary mechanisms
throughout society.

The Panopticon
Proposed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century, the
Panopticon was an architectural and theoretical plan for a new kind of all-seeing
penitentiary. The Panopticon was to be a circular building with a watchtower in the
center, where a guard could watch prisoners in their cells all along the perimeter of the
building. Although the building never came into fruition, Foucault cites the Panopticon as
the ultimate representation of disciplinary power, one that is able to regulate the actions
and behavior of people based on fear and uncertainty.

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Walnut Street Prison
Though Foucault cites many examples of prison models that influenced France, the
most important one is the Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia. It opened in 1790,
initially being a holding prison but was eventually converted into a full-scale penitentiary.
Foucault writes that the principles of Walnut Street were modelled after Quaker beliefs,
particularly the notion that solitary confinement breeds to self-reflection, which leads to
the moral rehabilitation of the prisoner. Walnut Street is also unique for being one of the
first penal institutions to impose a strict daily schedule that included mandatory work,
isolation, and the potential of early release for prisoners.

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Themes
Power-Knowledge
Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge is central to Discipline and Punish, and his
thought in general. For Foucault, power and knowledge are not to be understood as
independent concepts but are indivisibly connected – knowledge is always a function of
power, and power is always expressed and exerted through knowledge. The fact that
Foucault conceives of them as a unified concept indicates that in his thought, they
cannot be understood without each other.

Foucault understands power not merely as a political force, as one would see in a
sovereign over their subjects, but as a ubiquitous network of force relations that extends
everywhere. Foucault argues that power is through disciplinary means, which is enacted
through not just strictly penal institutions, but ones we are used to thinking of as
innocuous, such as schools and hospitals. An example of a powerful disciplinary
mechanism is the modern prevalence of surveillance, which Foucault writes is not
exercised merely from top to bottom, from “bottom to top and laterally” (176). This
means that power is exercised from many different angles, and can be seen in domains
that we would not expect. Foucault’s conception of punishment is a way of enacting
power, beyond its stated purposes of protecting society from criminals or rehabilitating
them.

The reason that power is so pervasive is because it exercises its influence through
knowledge, and even reproduces domains of knowledge for its own purposes.

The more potentially contentious aspect to Foucault’s notion of power-knowledge is that

knowledge cannot be conceived of without its relation to power. According to Foucault,
knowledge is never neutral – it is always interconnected with the web of power relations.
Foucault’s main example of this is the growth of the human sciences in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries were appropriated by those with power to serve their
purposes. Foucault writes that “a corpus of knowledge techniques, ‘scientific’ discourses
is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to punish” (23). While
prior to the eighteenth century, punishment targeted the criminal act committed, the
modern disciplinary society gathers a dossier of knowledge about the criminal, about
their psychology and social circumstances, in a way that treats them as an object to be
known, and disciplined accordingly. Thus, while the Enlightenment era views knowledge
as an ideal pursuit of truth, for Foucault “power produces knowledge,” (27) meaning that
any idea of truth is used against people to render them obedient to the larger power
structures.

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The Body
The changing significance of the body in the history of punishment functions as a way of
framing the evolution of power relations. Foucault summarizes his aim behind Discipline
and Punish as an attempt “to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis
of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power
relations and object relations” (24). This signals Foucault’s intention to read the body not
as a biological organism, but rather as a target for political control.

Throughout the history of punishment, the body has been physically subjected to
punitive practices. The era of “supplice,” of torture and public executions, treated the
body as the target of punishment, through which power could be exercised and publicly
displayed. The body under feudalism and absolutism was the main target of
punishment; it would be tortured, deprived of sustenance, restrained, and often deprived
of its life. In the modern disciplinary period, the body was not directly targeted through
the infliction of pain, but covertly: it began to be conceived of as an “instrument or
intermediary” to further power: the body was to be rendered obedient, and to be made
useful (11).

Even though punishment has always treated the body as an object to be literally seized
and controlled, power also subjected it as a means of representation to be read.
Monarchical powers would use the body as a means of inscribing their power; the
physical markings of corporeal punishment would serve as a sign, to the rest of the
people, of the great power of the sovereignty. The move to modern disciplinary
punishment came with it the principle that punishment should strike the “soul” rather
than the body; however, we can see that in modern punishment the body was still
controlled, albeit through more abstract means. Disciplinary institutions imposed their
power through controlling the partitioning of bodies through time and space. In this
manner, the body becomes a representation of docility, defined through how useful and
obedient it is. While the body as a means of physical punishment is treated as property,
the body as a sign is treated strategically, as a means of achieving the self-sustaining
goals of the larger power structures.

Discipline
Modern power, for Foucault, is defined by discipline, rather than through physical force.
In a sense, discipline is a more effective form of power because it targets “the soul,”
through the covert and nuanced control of thought, motives, and behavior. While it
operates on multiple levels, the main feature of discipline is that it functions through
negative action – while discipline can force people to do certain things and act in a
specific manner, what makes it distinctive as a method of control is that targets what
people do not do, or have not yet done.

Foucault identifies three mechanisms through which discipline exerts its control:
hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and the examination. What these three
tactics have in common is that they create in an individual the desire to be disciplined,

49
either through fear or psychological manipulation. Observation always creates the
potentiality of being watched, meaning that an individual will be obedient out of fear of
being reprimanded. Normalization and the examination manipulate the individual to
want to conform, out of the desire to not appear abnormal, or to gain benefits such as
advancing in status or rank. This means that power has moved from targeting specific
acts to targeting a failure to conform to set standards, or norms. In this way, discipline
infiltrates personal identity, by making people docile through self-surveillance and self-
discipline.

But for these complex forms of manipulative discipline to occur, there needs to be a
more rudimentary form of discipline, which works through the organization of time and
space. The creation of time-tables to govern an individual’s every moment was done to
ensure that time was spent efficiently, and to increase supervision over them by
guaranteeing the kind of activities they do at specific times. Space was controlled
through the alteration of architecture. This is achieved either through enclosure and
partitioning into smaller groups, or through the creation of spaces like the Panopticon
that enable total observation. The extortion of power through time and space, then,
serves to better target what people do not do, by creating an environment so rigid that
they forced into obedience.

Resistance and Penal Reform

Foucault’s conception of resistance to power and its aim of reform differs from common
views the intentions that back these movements: the forces that drive reform are not
necessarily aimed at humanizing punishment, but are rooted in their own self-interested
socio-political aims.

The rhetoric of the eighteenth century reformers criticized the punishment enacted by
the sovereign for being too cruel and arbitrary, and sought to replace it with a system of
punishment that was aimed at the mind rather than the body. It would achieve this by
rehabilitating the offender’s thoughts and motivations to make the them less inclined to
commit crime, through the promotion of self-reflection and good habits. Yet, Foucault
argues that their intentions were self-serving. Foucault writes that “the criticism of the
reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as
[in] a bad economy of power” (79). The fact that drive for reform occurred from within
the legal system, through magistrates and lawyers, means that people within the system
sought to have more control for themselves, which is why they spoke of a more equal
distribution of power. The intention of reform, then, was not to punish people less, but to
redistribute the power to punish in a way that was beneficial to certain groups of people.
This is especially seen in Foucault’s discussion on the reformer’s shifting attitudes
toward popular illegality, as the bourgeoisie financially and politically benefitted from
certain types of illegality, and conversely, discouraged those types which did not benefit
them, such as the theft of property.

If there was any genuine humanist intention behind the reform, it was never actualized.
Foucault suggests that the reforms proposed encouraged the same kind of disciplinary

50
conformity that characterize modern punishment. The reformers’ desire to punish more
“deeply” reflects the modern impulse for more pervasive societal control. The “semio-
technique” of punishment that the reformers proposed meant that crime was to be
discouraged through “obstacle-signs”, which was aimed at creating a societal
consciousness against criminality that promoted fitting into social norms. Foucault’s
point is that the reform movement, while it may have had some good intentions, ended
up being a means for a restructured form of power to develop.

Visibility and Invisibility

For Foucault, the fundamental change that occurred in the history of punishment, its
movement from a spectacle of torture to a disciplinary society, can be characterized by
a shift between visibility and invisibility. Power during French absolutism functioned by
way of its visibility, as the operation of power constituted a spectacle to be witnessed by
the observing populace. The spectacular nature of public executions exhibited a power
relation through fear: the criminal’s tortured body became a symbol for the power of the
sovereign, the display of which was induce fear in the masses that would deter them
from committing crime. While the criminal being tortured was visible, they were merely
an instrument to display the strength of the sovereign’s power.

Foucault argues that this relation shifts and reverses in the modern period – power
becomes invisible, and the visibility which used to belong to the sovereign gets shifted
to the individual that commits the crime. While under absolutism the monarch was made
visible, in the modern era visibility is confined to those without power, such as inmates
in a prison. Control through visibility involves a series of disciplinary practices that
treated people as objects to be known, through constant surveillance. The other way,
that people are rendered more visible is through the examination, which creates a
visibility over individuals by classifying their identity. In this way, knowledge is used to
make people more visible and thus more controllable.

The ideal representation of power enacted through invisibility is the Panopticon, Jeremy
Bentham’s plan for a privatized prison, which was to be a circular building with a
watchtower in its center, its architecture enabling total observation of its inmates. With
the Panopticon, invisibility goes further – prisoners police their own behavior at the mere
potentiality of being watched. In this sense, Foucault writes that in the Panopticon “one
is totally seen, without ever seeing” (202). Consequently, the basis of disciplinary power
is an effect achieved merely to being endangered by the gaze. While the Panopticon
was never fully realized, Foucault argues that this “visibility trap” extends across society
and can be seen in different institutions but lurks in the background.

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Styles
Structure
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is a nonfiction study of the historical processes that
contributed to the development of the prison in the West. It is divided into four parts,
each corresponding to a set period in the history of punishment. Each part is further
divided into two or three subsections, based on a theme that typifies that particular part.

What defines the structure of Discipline and Punish is its classification as a genealogy.
Unlike a typical historical book, which might try to trace a specific domain of history in its
entirety, a genealogical study is an investigative method that tries to unearth the origins
of the circumstances that makeup the present. As a result of this interpretative process,
the structure of Foucault’s study is not strictly chronological. Instead, we see that
Foucault often begins each subsection with a dominant image that dictates a sense of
what is to follow. Foucault relies heavily on contrast, so sometimes a section opens with
two oppositional images, which Foucault then seeks to explain the difference between
the two. The main example of this is the contrast he develops in the beginning, when he
uses an account of Damiens’ execution juxtaposed against a nineteenth century prison
time-table. Foucault’s genealogical method is more about why things are the way they
are, which is why his account is not structured in a neatly cause-and-effect fashion.

Foucault also interlaces primary sources of historical accounts with his own argument to
solidify the points he intends to argue. As a result, Foucault often employs lists to
explain key causes, effects, or concepts that are significant to a particular development.
These structural features imbue Foucault’s study with a sense that events do not occur
with a linear rationality, but rather occur “spatially” – Foucault looks at specific prevalent
ideas that characterize historical events, and crafts a web of influences from different
domains around those events.

Perspective
Discipline and Punish is written in the third-person objective point of view. This means
that even though Foucault is writing the study as himself, he does not insert himself into
the narrative, and instead writes in an impersonal tone. The very few times he does
refer to himself in the first-person, serve to clarify his argumentative position, rather than
to imbue his study with personal elements; in this vein, he concludes the study by
writing that in first-person that he hopes his book will serve as an impetus for further
study on power-knowledge.

An important thing to note is that Foucault’s thought is heavily concerned with the power
relations that dominate society, so any historical study he writes is likely to derive its
perspective with power in mind. More specifically, he interprets events in the history of
punishment in terms of the power-knowledge mechanisms that, according to him,

52
constitute all penal reactions in society. Other scholars might view the same events in a
different way, or might employ a structure that is more conventionally associated with
historical books.

Though Foucault does not tell us explicitly his personal opinions on modern disciplinary
society, it is easy to get the sense that he thinks that it is a pervasive problem that we
have little hope of solving which gives the text a sense of where Foucault personally
stands on the matter. The feeling that Foucault is principally “against” the power
mechanisms he describes may make us conceive of him as coming from a
revolutionarily-minded perspective. Yet, this feeling does not amount to considering
Discipline and Punish as resembling a treatise or manifesto, so we should not assume
that Foucault simply writes in order to spur his readers for change. Foucault is a social
theorist and philosopher, and we should read him as such, by evaluating his claims with
analytic and argumentative rigor.

Tone
Even though this study is historical nonfiction, Foucault writes with a strong rhetorical
style that borders on being impassioned. More specifically, Foucault is an evocative
writer that often employs figurative language, which can be surprising for a book that is
meant to be an objective historical account. He frequently uses symbols to get his
arguments across, which tend to have a dramatic effect due to their depiction of trying
situations. Consequently, this feature may give the reader the impression of unexpected
literariness.

It is easy to see how Foucault’s highly stylized and forceful prose could detract from the
logic of the arguments he makes. He often writes in long complex sentences that build
off of each other with multiple clauses, interweaving quotations and images from other
sources. Foucault also frames things in such stark dichotomies that makes it seem like
every historical development occurred in stark opposition to what preceded it, which
could open his claims up to objections. Though he offers a lot of supporting evidence for
his claims, his characteristic prose style may make it difficult to ascertain his arguments,
strictly from a rational point of view.

Foucault’s prose style contributes to the force of his arguments – he uses a lot of irony,
sarcasm, and strongly-evocative images that seem to underlie the force of the
dissemination of power-knowledge. Far from being dry, his tone comes off dually as
being intellectually rigorous while highly ornamental. Foucault’s uniqueness rests in the
fact that even though we get a sense from his critical tone of disciplinary society where
his personal views lie, he affords the opposite point of view with equal persuasive
flourish to the point where it almost seems as if he is committing himself to positions he
intends to contest. As a result, Foucault’s style is captivating, but intellectually rigorous,
making him a unique writer of historical philosophy.

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Quotes
Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public
spectacle. Today we are rather inclined to ignore it; perhaps, in its time, it gave rise to
too much inflated rhetoric; perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too
emphatically to a process of "humanization", thus dispensing with the need for further
analysis.

Importance: This is an important part of Foucault's argument - the contention that

punishment has become gradually humane over time is a too readily made assumption
that requires interrogation. With his analysis of modern disciplinary techniques, he
shows that punishment has not become more humane, but has restructured its
methods.

This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian
theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods
of punishment, supervision, and constraint.”

Importance: Foucault uses Christian principles to make a powerful contrast between

what we are inclined to think and what disciplinary society has done to individuals. This
quote supplements his point that the disciplinary machine that controls modern society
creates individuals, by using knowledge for individualization. In Foucault's conception,
"the soul" is not the Christian soul, but the inner reality that we associate with our
personal identities.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,

nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power
relations."

Importance: This passage is important because it is where Foucault defines his central
concept of power-knowledge. He is saying that power cannot be understood apart from
knowledge, and knowledge cannot be produced except to be appropriated by power.
This is contrary to the Enlightenment-era view of knowledge, which sees it neutral and a
separate realm that humans cannot control.

The day was to come, in the nineteenth century, where this 'man', discovered in the
criminal, would become the target of penal intervention, the object that it claimed to
correct and transform, the domain of a whole series of 'criminological sciences and
strange 'penitentiary' practices."

Importance: This quote explains Foucault's claim that modern discipline became as
prevalent as it did due to the flourishing of the sciences. Disciplinary society used
knowledge as a means of control, by treating humans as objects of knowledge that can
be known. This also marks the shift from punishing acts to punishing the human, and
aiming to correct them.

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The 'invention' of this new political anatomy must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It
is rather a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location,
which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish
themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and
gradually produce the blueprint of a general method.

Importance: This quote refers to the emergence of disciplinary forces, particularly the
nuanced ways through which they work on people. Foucault is saying that disciplinary
techniques did not suddenly fall upon society, but occurred covertly through many
different means.

Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards

individuals both as objects and as instruments of exercise. It is not a triumphant power,
which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest,
suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy".

Importance: The point of discipline is that it simultaneously makes people obedient but
also useful. Unlike sovereign power, discipline "hides" its influence, working in ways that
one might not immediately recognize as relations of power.

Visibility is a trap."

Importance: The main way that institutional discipline makes people docile is through
observation, or the constant threat of observation. While the observer remains invisible,
the person being observed is rendered obedient merely through being watched. The
prime example of this is the Panopticon, the architecture of which enables constant
surveillance of its inmates.

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”

Importance: This is one of Foucault's more contentious claims - that the era
characterized by positive values such as equality and the free pursuit of knowledge was
actually responsible for fostering a deeper control over the social body.

The prison is the clearest, simplest, most equitable of penalties.

Importance: Though Foucault says this with a touch of irony, he means that the prison
made "sense" because it took away the most valued principle of the time - civil liberties.
Also, the prison neutralized all punishments for a variety of crimes into one, namely,
imprisonment.

In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power
relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of 'incarceration', objects
for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the
distant roar of battle.

Importance: As long as there is power, there will be resistance to that power. So

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Foucault is saying that despite the seemingly intractable nature of the complex
mechanisms of power, there will always be a pushback against such pervasive power.

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to
something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

Importance: Here, Foucault emphasizes the main quality disciplinary punishment.

While the punishment during absolutism targeted the criminal act itself, the modern
penal system creates a body of knowledge about the criminal through which to punish
them.

The conjuncture that saw the birth of reform is not, therefore, that of a new sensibility,
but that of another policy with regard to illegalities.

Importance: Foucault reveals here that what drove reform was not a genuine desire for
change, but a reflection of the prevailing social class at the time. When the middle-class
rose, they began to be less tolerant of illegalities that were permitted under absolutism,
like theft, because it directly impacted them.

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Topics for Discussion
Foucault claims that doctors, teachers, and social
workers perpetuate disciplinary society by
observation and individualization. Does this view have
any merit? Why or why not?
The point is to get the student to consider the real-life consequences of Foucault's
claims. He's wrong in the sense that people in these professions are dedicated to
helping people, and likely are not the strict disciplinarians that Foucault makes them out
to be. On the other hand, Foucault has a point in that people in these professions
operate in a system that can control people's lives.

Is Foucault right to say that the modern penal system

is not as "humane" as we would like to think? Why or
why not?
Foucault is right in the sense that there are clearly problems in the penal system. Many
people get incarcerated for minor crimes, and the treatment of prisoners is not always
humane. Many people are subjected to the extra-penal incarceration that Foucault
mentions, and are treated as "criminals" even when they get out of jail - making it
difficult for them to get a job and readjust back to society. On the other hand, the
removal of torture is a positive development in our society, but we should keep in mind
that that is not the case all over the world.

The Enlightenment-era is associated with the

proliferation of knowledge, but Foucault writes that
this knowledge was used as a means of controlling
people. Is he right? Is there any form of knowledge
that is not associated with power?
This intention of this prompt is to get students to consider the ontological implications of
knowledge. While Foucault is correct in the sense that knowledge can be used against
people, such as through the creation of a "criminal psychology," there are surely fields of
knowledge that are untouched by power relations. The biological and physical sciences
are devoted to improving quality of life and understanding of our world. Criminology as a
field, while some of its findings may be used in the ways Foucault suggests, does not,
as a whole, intend to "entrap" people further. Ultimately each field of knowledge may be

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used for instrumental means, but generally are intended for the progression of
humanity.

One of Foucault's main claims is that disciplinary

society eliminates individual subjectivity by "creating
it". Is there a way of escaping this system of
classification? Is Foucault's claim too extreme?
Yes and no. We can still retain a sense of inner self even if we are constantly subjected
to observation, examination and normalization. Conversely, it is true that our "value" as
human beings is determined by "performance," test scores, and obedience to
institutional norms.

Foucault argues that despite the prison's failures, it

persisted as the dominant form of punishment. Why?
Foucault argues that the prison persists because certain groups of people benefit from
it. Another potential reason may be that there is no better way to deal with criminality, in
a way that protects society but also respects the humanity of the individual.

In what ways is our society not like the carceal society

that Foucault describes?
Modern societies are not as strictly controlled as Foucault describes. Increasing
globalization makes it more difficult to have such a tightly bound disciplinary society as
Foucault describes. Social inequality, while still a problem, has improved to a degree.

Foucault writes that prison reforms largely failed. Are

there any reforms that can succeed? Why or why not?
This question intends to get students to consider the complications surrounding prison
reform. While many people agree that prisons are inhumane because of things like
solitary confinement or heavy prison sentences for minor crimes, it is difficult to get
widespread consensus on what alternatives could be implemented. Foucault argues
that the prison has not changed because it benefits people in power (as it stands) but
perhaps the reason for its static nature is that it is difficult implement widespread
change.

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Is there any way to have discipline, whether parental,
or discipline practised in schools, that is not as
insidious as Foucault describes?
This prompt tries to get the student to consider discipline as a general concept. We are
used to accepting certain forms of "necessary" discipline, especially in parenting. But
the limits of discipline are not strictly defined. In the case of parenting and schooling,
certain forms of discipline are seen to be for the good of children. Yet, there must be a
point where discipline is harmful for an individual.

Foucault writes that the prison "borrowed" its ways of

organizing bodies through time and space from
medieval monastery, which was then picked up by
other institutions such as schools and hospitals.
Where else can we see disciplinary forms?
This question intends to get the student to recognize the ways that disciplinary
mechanisms can be seen in different arrangements across society. They are more
pervasive than they seem, and can be seen even in non-institutions, such as the family,
or even adopted in a self-imposed way.

What is one way that prisons could be less totalizing

in their control over inmates? In other words, what
could be one reform that would improve the treatment
of prison inmates?
The point of this question is to consider what some practical solutions could be to the
problem Foucault presents. For one, more accountability among prison administrators
to prevent abuses of power, so that individuals do not have the ability to exert a large
amount of control over any inmate.

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