Foucault's Discipline and Punish

Foucault Discipline and punish (1975).

This study traces the development of discipline and punishment used by humans from punishment as a spectacle such as public torture and hangings, to the “gentler” more modern methods of imprisonment and reform.  There is a particular emphasis on how such methods are utilised as a vehicle for effective control.  He goes on to say that this new approach to punishment has been modified for use in the control of an entire society.  In modern times schools, factories, hospitals, prison even the home are all modelled on this new form of prison.

For Foucault, discipline is a mechanism of power which regulates behaviour of individuals in society. This is done by regulating the organisation of space, time and behaviour, aided and enforced by complex systems of surveillance. He uses the term 'disciplinary society', discussing its history and disciplinary institutions.   A 'disciplinary society' does not denote a 'disciplined society'. Foucault emphasizes that power is not discipline; rather discipline is a way in which power can be exercised. Foucault explains,

                       This power is not exercised simply as an obligation or

                       a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it invests them,

                       is transmitted by them and through them ( 27).

Foucault shows how peoples’ behaviour implied a series of interventions—socially and bodily. Despite beginning with bodily torture, the course of discipline moved toward interventions of escalating intimacy.  Intimidation through intimacy there seems to be a close link between these two words.  Rather than the body the mind and the soul are targeted. This is strikingly similar to the words of Adorno and Horkheimer thirty years previously when discussing the culture industry;

                        

                        tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul.

                        The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He

                        says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your

                        property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on

                        you are a stranger among us.”  

The Panopticon, was a design for a prison produced by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century which grouped cells around a central viewing tower built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others, while each inmate is always visible to the central tower.  It is a complex method of surveillance in which the inmate has no knowledge of when they are being observed and therefore must behave as if under constant observation.   Control is achieved as the inmate becomes complicit in his own surveillance and effectively monitors or polices himself.  The original panopticon prison was never actually built but the idea remained and was used as a model for numerous institutions not only prisons. It is employed by Foucault as a metaphor for the operation of power and surveillance in contemporary society.


References

Foucault, M.  (1977)  Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Hazell, Watson & Viney Ltd: England