Discipline bonpetit Henri', but in the misfortunes of 'little Hans'. The Romance of the Rose is written today by Mary Barnes; in the place of Lance lot, 3. Panoptic ism we have Judge Schreber. It is often said that the model of a society that has individuals as its constituent elements is borrowed from the abstract juridical forms of contract and exchange. Mercantile society, according to this view, is represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical subjects. Perhaps. Indeed, the political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often seems to follow this schema. But it should not be forgotten that there existed at the same The following, according to an order published at the end of the period a technique for constituting individuals as correlative ele- seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague ments of power and knowledge. The individual is no doubt the appeared in a town.' fictitious atom of an 'ideological' representation of society; but he is First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, have called 'discipline'. We must cease once and for all to describe the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact, power the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave gained of him belong to this production. on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of Is it not somewhat excessive to derive such power from the petty each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands machinations of discipline? How could they achieve effects of such it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until scope? the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the sup- pliers and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the 'crows', who can be left to die: these are 'people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices'. It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment. Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere:'A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men

194 195 Discipline Panopticism of substance', guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it. absolute authority of the magistrates, 'as also to observe all disorder, Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process theft and extortion'. At each of the town gates there will be an of purifying the houses one by one is begun.All the inhabitants are observation post; at the end of each street sentinels.Every day, the made to leave; in each room 'the furniture and goods' are raised intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have around the room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and anything to complain of; they 'observe their actions'. Every day, even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those who stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry, 'in windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allo- the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not cated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they have something on their persons as they left that they did not have may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs on entering'.Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter himself as to the state of each and everyone of them -'in which their homes. respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in pain of death'; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the must ask why: 'In this way he will find out easily enough whether slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, dead or sick are being concealed.' Everyone locked up in his in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according himself when asked - it is the great review of the living and the to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is con- dead. stantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to disciplinary mechanism.The plague is met by order; its function is the magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the 'lock up', the role to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which one; this document bears 'the name, age, sex of everyone, notwith- is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays standing his condition': a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even the course of the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities - to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the person without having received from him a written note 'to prevent frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick of the contagion, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the unknown to the magistrates'.The registration of the pathological figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the

196 197 Discipline Panopticism plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underlying dis- mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary func- ciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of tioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his all human contact, underlies projects of exclusion. 'true' body, his 'true' disease. The plague as a form, at once real They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the nineteenth century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which haunting memory of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of live and die in disorder. power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat 'lepers' as 'plague If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to victims', project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analy- great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary pro- tical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but jects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion - this is what people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper was caught the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his hospital. Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those control function according to a double mode; that of binary division sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partition- and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); ing in which individual differentiations we,re the constricting effects and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of plague victims; the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of disci- same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the plinary controls makes it possible to brand the 'leper' and to bring second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power I into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their 'I constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which ! dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed through- every individual is subjected, brings us back LO our own time, by out with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter

198 199 Panopticism Discipline contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no derive. copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those dis- Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composi- tractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or tion. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peri- abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. pheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multipli- width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, city that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the out- the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, side, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. 60-64). All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the auto- a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can marie functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveil- observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, lance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see con- of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be stantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the prin- caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the ciple of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to bearers.To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and elimin- prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, ates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham To begin with, this made it possible - as a negative effect - to laid down the principle that power should be visible and unveri- avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be fiable.Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the looked at at anyone moment; but he must be sure that he may always side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his compan- be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector ions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their celis, cannot even see a never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the in- one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the mates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad would betray the presence of the guardian.2 The Panopticon is a reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of

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machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peri ph- which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle I eric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may tower, one sees everything without ever being seen." throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindivi- . more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and dualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance. in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation Bentham does not say whether he was inspired, in his project, by in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the Le Vaux's menagerie at Versailles: the first menagerie in which the marks by which the sovereign's surplus power was manifested are different elements are not, as they traditionally were, distributed in useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequili- a park (Loisel, 104-7). At the centre was an octagonal pavilion brium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises which, on the first floor, consisted of only a single room, the king's power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the salon; on every side large windows looked out onto seven cages machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his (the eighth side was reserved for the entrance), containing different visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not species of animals. By Bentham's time, this menagerie had dis- matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the appeared. But one finds in the programme of the Panopticon a malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who similar concern with individualizing observation, with characteriza- wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of tion and classification, with the analytical arrangement of space. The those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man, numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious machinery of a furtive power. With this exception, the Panopticon awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each indivi- homogeneous effects of power. dual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among school- So it is n?t necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good children, it makes it possible to observe performances (without behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: normal development, to distinguish 'laziness and stubbornness' from there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all 'incurable imbecility'; among workers, it makes it possible to note that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the the aptitudes of each worker, compare the time he takes to perform openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old 'houses of security', a task, and if they are paid by the day, to calculate their wages with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, (Bentham, 60-64). economic geometry of a 'house of certainty'. The efficiency of So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experi- other side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is ments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experi- subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsi- ment with medicines and monitor their effects. To tryout different bility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontane- punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, ously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques

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simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment - the out pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up once differences are important. They mark, at a distance of a century and again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using a half, the transformations of the disciplinary programme. In the orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their six- first case, there' is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary teenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or evil, power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could visible; it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it learn anything; one would follow 'the genealogy of every observable partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and idea'; one could bring up different children according to different the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and reduced, in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them dualism of life and death: that which moves brings death, and one together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would kills that which moves. The Panopticon, on the other hand, must then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.No would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the doubt Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privileged place for itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the enough. As opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon of torture, to be seen in Piranese's engravings, the Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, war- realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed ders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their be- for almost two hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be haviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able to obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure archi- judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how tectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology the entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed that may and must be detached from any specific use. as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, director's own fate entirely bound up with it? The incompetent but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the physician who has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals epidemic or a revolt. ' "By every tie I could devise", said the master in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposi- of the Panopticon, "my own fate had been bound up by me with tion of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instru- theirs" (Bentham, 177). The Panopticon functions as a kind of ments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemen- laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it ted in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's beha- dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a viour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is may be used. It is - necessary modifications apart - applicable 'to exercised. all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large

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to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are power relations function in a function, and of making a function meant to be kept under inspection' (Bentham, 40; although Bentham function through these power relations. Bentham's Preface to takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is because it has Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his many different functions to fulfil - safe custody, confinement, 'inspection-house': 'Morals reformed - health preserved - industry solitude, forced labour and instruction). invigorated - instruction diffused - public burthens lightened - Economy In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exer- seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws cise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in architecture!' (Bentham, number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of 39)· those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the cen- conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised tral tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case, spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose he can gain a clear idea of the way in which the surveillance is practised. effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical In fact, any panoptic institution, even if it is as rigorously closed instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on as a penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected to such irregu- individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind'. The panoptic lar and constant inspections: and not only by the appointed inspec- schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its tors, but also by the public; any member of society will have the economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power' 'in increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate hitherto unexampled quantity', 'a great and new instrument of into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism Will be democratically government ... ; its great excellence consists in the great strength controlled, since it will be constantly accessible 'to the great tribunal it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to committee of the world'. 4 This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that apply it to' (Bentham, 66). an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers. sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can consti- exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole. tute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of know- The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any ledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the pro- of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; cesses that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion its vocation was to become a generalized function. The plague- between 'surplus power' and 'surplus production'. In short, it stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death, power added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced to functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the meti- their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The culous exercise of the right of the sword. The Panopticon, on the panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective,

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it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body. These threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces - to disciplines, which the classical age had elaborated in specific, increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, relatively enclosed places - barracks, schools, workshops - and raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply. whose 'total implementation had been imagined only at the limited How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from and temporary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be every- regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator where and always alert, running through society without interrup- of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of pro- tion in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the duction? How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase formula for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them?The elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning Panopticon's solution to this problem is that the productive increase of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary of power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised mechanisms. continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the exercise of sovereignty. The body of the king, with its strange edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a new physics of power represented by panopticism; the domain of functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; what are required to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of are mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combina- a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: tions, and which use instruments that render visible, record, the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations. the disciplinary society. At the theoretical level, Bentham defines another way of analysing A whole disciplinary generalization - the Benthamite physics of the social body and the power relations that traverse it; in terms of power represents an acknowledgement of this - had operated practice, he defines a procedure of subordination of bodies and forces throughout the classical age. The spread of disciplinary institutions, that must increase the utility of power while practising the economy whose network was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and of the prince. Panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political occupying above all a less and less marginal position, testifies to anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty this: what was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure, but the relations of discipline. or a singular model, became a general formula; the regulations The celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high tower, characteristic of the Protestant and pious armies of William of powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a project of a Orange or of Gustavus Adolphus were transformed into regulations perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one for all the armies of Europe; the model colleges of the Jesuits, or the may 'unlock' the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused, schools of Batencour or Demia, following the example set by Sturm,

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the child 'for a future in some mechanical work', to give him 'an provided the outlines for the general forms of educational dis- observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits' (Talleyrand's Report cipline; the ordering of the naval and military hospitals provided to the Constituent Assembly, 10 September 1791, quoted by Leon, the model for the entire reorganization of hospitals in the eighteenth 106). The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making century. useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of only the most visible aspect of various, more profound processes. exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow I. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were loosening of their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures. expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed popula- Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and tions, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some they were being asked to playa positive role, for they were becom- of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission ing able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become the eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary insti- a basic technique to enable the army to exist, not as an assembled tutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses. crowd, but as a unity that derives from this very unity an increase 2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one in its forces; discipline increases the skill of each individual, co- hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms ordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, have a certain tendency to become 'de-institutionalized', to emerge broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, in- from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to creases the capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the work- circulate in a 'free' state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken shop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral and specific function a role of external surveillance, developing influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also an economy. When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor school tends to constitute minute social observatories that penetrate who were unable to bring up their children left them 'in ignorance even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a bad behaviour of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext, living, and themselves having been badly brought up, they are according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbours, unable to communicate a sound upbringing that they themselves especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not never had'; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance of tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny, to find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers, brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always whether they are determined to root out the vices of their children, ready to stir up public disorder and 'virtually to exhaust the funds how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrange- of the Hotel-Dieu' (Demia, 60--61). Now, at the beginning of the ments are; the visit may end with the giving of alms, the present of a 0 Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, religious picture, or the provision of additional beds (Dernia, 39-4 ). among other things, to 'fortify', to 'develop the body', to prepare

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Similarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived of as a base for 3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. In England, it the medical observation of the population outside; after the burning was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline (cf. Radzinovitz, 203-14); in France, down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced although a part' of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in or charity associations, another - and no doubt the most important the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert part - was very soon taken over by the police apparatus. to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to The organization of a centralized police had long been regarded, give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression of royal of the sanitary state of the region. 5 absolutism; the sovereign had wished to have 'his own magistrate to One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, inten- form of enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation dis- tions, and who was entrusted with the execution of orders and seminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity orders under the King's private seal' (a note by Duval, first secretary organizations had long played this role of 'disciplining' the popula- at the police magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, I). In effect, tion.From the Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the in taking over a number of pre-existing functions - the search for July monarchy, initiatives of this type continued to increase; their criminals, urban surveillance, economic and political supervision - aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid the police magistratures and the magistrature-general that presided and encouragement to work) or political (the struggle against dis- over them in Paris transposed them into a single, strict, administra- content or agitation). One has only to cite by way of example the tive machine:'All the radiations of force and information that regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. The spread from the circumference culminate in the magistrate-general. territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and ... It is he who operates all the wheels that together produce order the members of the associations divided themselves up along the and harmony. The effects of his administration cannot be better same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas compared than to the movement of the celestial bodies' (Des regularly. 'They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute, tobacco Essarts, 344 and 528). shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy, im- But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized piety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.' in the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the linked directly to the centre of political sovereignty, the type of information to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments, to which it applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be knowledge of a trade, morality (and 'whether they have not fallen coextensive with the entire social body and not only by the extreme into poverty through their own fault'); lastly, 'one must learn by limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there concerned with. Police power must bear 'over everything': it is not is peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are care- however the totality of the state nor of the kingdom as visible and ful to bring up their children in the fear of God ... whether they do invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust of events, actions, not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together and behaviour, opinions - 'everything that happens'; 7 the police are with them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery concerned with 'those things of every moment', those 'unimportant in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has any things', of which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction 6 doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their (Supplement to the Instruction for the drawing up of a new code, 17 9, article 535). With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a marriage certificate'. 5

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supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, disciplinary function to its role as the auxiliary of justice in the the most passing phenomenon of the social body: 'The ministry of pursuit of criminals and as an instrument for the political supervision the magistrates and police officers is of the greatest importance; the of plots, opposition movements or revolts. It was a complex func- objects that it embraces are in a sense definite, one may perceive tion since it linked the absolute power of the monarch to the lowest them only by a sufficiently detailed examination' (Delamare, un- levels of power disseminated in society; since, between these differ- numbered Preface): the infinitely small of political power. ent, enclosed institutions of discipline (workshops, armies, schools), And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the it extended an intermediary network, acting where they could not instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, intervene, disciplining the non-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisi- the gaps, linked them together, guaranteed with its armed force an ble. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline. 'By means of a wise social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted police, the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience' everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized (Vattel, 162). network which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the The organization of the police apparatus in the eighteenth century forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the 'observers', sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines that became co-exten- who were paid regularly, the 'basses mouches'; or secret agents, who sive with the state itself. Although it was linked in the most explicit were paid by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job way with everything in the royal power that exceeded the exercise done, and finally the prostitutes. And this unceasing observation of regular justice, it is understandable why the police offered such had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout slight resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial power; and why the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with ever- society by means of a complex documentary organization (on the increasing weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt police registers in the eighteenth century, cf. Chassaigne). And, because it is the secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also because, unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was to a far greater degree than the judicial institution, it is identified, registered in this way were forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibili- by reason of its extent and mechanisms, with a society of the ties, suspicions - a permanent account of individuals' behaviour. disciplinary type. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the dis- Now, it should be noted that, although this police supervision ciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for all was entirely 'in the hands of the king', it did not function in a single by a state apparatus. direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond, 'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, com- of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations prising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a king"s private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal technology. And it may be taken over either by 'specialized' institu- rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political tions (the penitentiaries or 'houses of correction' of the nineteenth grounds, were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables, century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a neighbours, parish priests; and their function was to punish by particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities confinement a whole infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, dis- that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal obedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial from his architecturally perfect city and which he called 'offences of relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become 'disci- non-surveillance'. In short, the eighteenth-century police added a plined', absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first

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and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, increasing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for towards that great aim the building and distribution of buildings the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal); or by intended to observe a great multitude of men at the same time.' apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus described as a technical programme. Our society is one not of from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, over society as a whole (the police). there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the and. a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine', to an indefinitely anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'. Not because the disci- individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is plinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The infinitesimal distribution of the power relations. importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character A few years after Bentham, Julius gave this society its birth probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of certificate (Julius, 384-6). Speaking of the panoptic principle, he the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, said that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity: permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. He is the individual who it was an event in the 'history of the human mind'. In appearance, looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a minute, can escape: 'You may consider that no part of the Empire whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of is without surveillance, no crime, no offence, no contravention that spectacle. 'To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection remains unpunished, and that the eye of the genius who can en- of a small number of objects': this was the problem to which the lighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without, how- architecture of temples, theatres and circuses responded. With ever, the slightest detail escaping his attention' (Treilhard, 14)· At spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity of the moment of its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, assumes with the Emperor the old aspect of the power of spectacle. society found new vigour and formed for a moment a single great As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: 'To procure ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process view of a great multitude.' In a society in which the principal by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and spectacle: 'It was to the modern age, to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details the sun.

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The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a their network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all number of broad historical processes - economic, juridico-political by the 'costly' nature of the power that was exercised in them. It and, lastly, scientific - of which it forms part. was costly in several senses: because directly it cost a great deal to I. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are the Treasury; because the system of corrupt offices and farmed-out techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is taxes weighed indirectly, but very heavily, on the population; true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this: because the resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle of per- every system of power is presented with the same problem. But the petual reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to (levying on money or products by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, taxation; levying on men or time by corvees of press-ganging, by to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economic- locking up or banishing vagabonds). The development of the disci- ally, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, plines marks the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it a quite different economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their proceeding by deduction, are integrated into the productive effi- maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without ciency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this 'economic' growth of efficiency and into the use of what it produces.For the old principle power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, of 'levying-violence', which governed the economy of power, the industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to disciplines substitute the principle of 'mildness-production-profit'. increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multi- system. This triple objective of the disciplines corresponds to a plicity of men and the multiplication of the apparatuses of produc- well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture tion (and this means not only 'production' in the strict sense, but was the large demographic thrust of the eighteenth century; an also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the increase in the floating population (one of the primary objects of production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructive discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change of force in the army). quantitative scale in the groups to be supervised or manipulated In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of (from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eve of the problems for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently French Revolution, the school population had been increasing equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: rapidly, as had no doubt the hospital population; by the end of the reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than eighteenth century, the peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men). a unity; reduce what is opposed to the use of each of its elements The other aspect of the conjuncture was the growth in the apparatus and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages of production, which was becoming more and more extended and of number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates complex; it was also becoming more costly and its profitability had movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings to be increased. The development of the disciplinary methods of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no doubt, to the new it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the need to adjust their correlation. Neither the residual forms of feudal forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized power nor the structures of the administrative monarchy, nor the multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that local mechanisms of supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that they all formed together could carry out this role: they were wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, hindered from doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension of coalitions - anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.

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made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, Hence the fact that the disciplines use procedures of partitioning costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were and verticality, that they introduce, between the different elements superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation compact hierarchical networks, in short, that they oppose to the of capital - cannot be separated; it would not have been possible intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continu- to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth ous, individualizing pyramid. They must also increase the particular of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and utility of each element of the multiplicity, but by means that are the using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multi- multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. plicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence, in order to At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of the overall methods known as time-tables, collective training, exercises, disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations total and detailed surveillance. Furthermore, the disciplines must (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter XIII and the very interesting increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each analysis in Guerry and Deleule). Each makes the other possible and is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is in necessary; each provides a model for the other.The disciplinary order to increase the utilizable effects of the multiple that the disci- pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the plines define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment of bodies, separation, coordination and supervision of tasks was imposed and gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal co- made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures and ordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well production; the massive projection of military methods onto indus- articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in trial organization was an example of this modelling of the division the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous of labour following the model laid down by the schemata of power. instruments of power, coextensive with the multiplicity that they But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration, production, its 'mechanical' breaking-down, were projected onto perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a the labour force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disci- is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a 'political' plines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth possible to increase the useful size of multiplicities by decreasing the of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disci- inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, plinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting must control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a forces and bodies, in short, 'political anatomy', could be operated nation, an army or a school, reaches the threshold of a discipline in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions. when the relation of the one to the other becomes favourable. 2. The panoptic modality of power - at the elementary, tech- If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques nical, merely physical level at which it is situated - is not under that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men

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juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not subordination of one group of people by another, the 'surplus' absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the power that is always fixed on the same side, the inequality of posi- bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politi- tion of the different 'partners' in relation to the common regulation, cally dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline. the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms We know, for example, how many real procedures undermine the constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is not the juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egali- least important. Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define tarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it pos- and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space sible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular bodies.The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded 'counter-law'. And, although the universal juridicism of modern as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which sup- in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in ports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and under- opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The mines the limits that are traced around the law. The minute disci- 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the plines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level disciplines. of emergence of the great apparatuses and the great political In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of the juridical norms according to which power was redistributed. of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more tricks that it has invented, and even to those 'sciences' that give it a indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter- respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asym- find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very metries and excluding reciprocities. First, because discipline creates foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas between individuals a 'private' link, which is a relation of constraints they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-reversible are a set of physico-political techniques.

222 223 Discipline Panopticism

To return to the problem of legal punishments, the prison with bizarre little utopia, a perverse dream - rather as though Bentham all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the had been the Fourier of a police society, and the Phalanstery had point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary taken on the form of the Panopticon. And yet this represented the power to observe; at the point where the universal punishments of abstract formula of a very real technology, that of individuals. the law are applied selectively to certain individuals and always the There were many reasons why it received little praise; the most same ones; at the point where the redefinition of the juridical subject obvious is that the discourses to which it gave rise rarely acquired, by the penalty becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point except in the academic classifications, the status of sciences; but the where the law is inverted and passes outside itself, and where the real reason is no doubt that the power that it operates and which it counter-law becomes the effective and institutionalized content of augments is a direct, physical power that men exercise upon one the juridical forms. What generalizes the power to punish, then, is another. An inglorious culmination had an origin that could be not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; only grudgingly acknowledged. But it would be unjust to compare it is the regular extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine techniques. or Amici's microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they 3· Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long are much more. If a historical equivalent or at least a point of history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, comparison had to be found for them, it would be rather in the was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level 'inquisitorial' technique. at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. At this point, the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial the disciplines crossed the 'technological' threshold.First the investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investiga- hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not sim- tion procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had ply 'reordered' by the disciplines; they became, thanks to them, developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification could be increase of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of turies. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the juris- power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge; prudence first of the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures of the oath, medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the the rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an episte- transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the mological 'thaw' through a refinement of power relations; a sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth multiplication of the effects of power through the formation by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investiga- and accumulation of new forms of knowledge. tion has since then been an integral part of western justice (even up The extension of the disciplinary methods is inscribed in a broad to our own day), one must not forget either its political origin, its historical process: the development at about the same time of many link with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or other technologies - agronomical, industrial, economic. But it must its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge. In be recognized that, compared with the mining industries, the fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental emerging chemical industries or methods of national accountancy, element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the compared with the blast furnaces or the steam engine, panopticism juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which, as has received little attention. It is regarded as not much more than a we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages.

225 224 Discipline Panopticism

It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics were born a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge from techniques of measurement; the sciences of nature, in any case, proper to each discipline (on this subject, cf. Tort). The great were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become practices of investigation. The great empirical knowledge that detached from its politico-juridical model; the examination, on the covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the other hand, is still caught up in disciplinary technology. ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and In the Middle Ages, the procedure of investigation gradually establishes the 'facts' (at a time when the western world was begin- superseded the old accusatory justice, by a process initiated from ning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had above; the disciplinary technique, on the other hand, insidiously its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition - that immense and as if from below, has invaded a penal justice that is still, in invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses principle, inquisitorial. All the great movements of extension that of our memory. But what this politico-juridical, administrative and characterize modern penality - the problematization of the criminal criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of behind his crime, the concern with a punishment that is a correction, nature, disciplinary analysis has been to the sciences of man. These a therapy, a normalization, the division of the act of judgement sciences, which have so delighted our 'humanity' for over a century, between various authorities that are supposed to measure, assess, have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the diagnose, cure, transform individuals - all this betrays the penetra- disciplines and their investigations. These investigations are perhaps tion of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition. to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, other strange sciences, what the terrible power of investigation was its 'useful' object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or the earth. up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold of the classi- of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The cal age, Bacon, lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a methodology extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the of investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great Observer infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation will produce the methodology of examination for the human of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, sciences? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible. For, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The although it is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an sciences, the investigation has detached itself from the inquisitorial interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended procedure, in which it was historically rooted, the examination has without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it. a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file It has always been and still is an intrinsic element of the disciplines. that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would Of course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a proce- integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. dure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a And, in effect, its appearance in the form of tests, interviews, gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic move- interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify ment that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the the mechanisms of discipline: educational psychology is supposed to logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The correct the rigours of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural exten- interview is supposed to rectify the effects of the discipline of work. sion of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and

226 227 Discipline registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument Part Four of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Prison

228 Prison ~; split between the accused and society, which, through the judge, addresses him in correct terms'. An indiscipline that is the indisci- 3. The carceral pline of native, immediate liberty: 'He is well aware that the appren- tice, the worker is a slave and that slavery is sad ... This liberty, this need of movement that possesses him, he is well aware that he would no longer enjoy it in a life of ordinary order ... He prefers liberty; what does he care if others see it as disorder? It is liberty, that is to say, the most spontaneous development of his individual- ity, a wild development and, consequently, brutal and limited, but a natural, instinctive development.' Indiscipline in family relations; Were I to fix the date of completion of the carceral system, I would it does not matter whether this lost child was abandoned or freed choose not r8ro and the penal code, nor even r844, when the law himself voluntarily, for 'he would have been unable to bear the laying down the principle of cellular internment was passed; I might slavery of education either at his parents' or with strangers'. And . not even choose r838, when books on prison reform by Charles through all these minute disciplines it is ultimately 'civilization' as a Lucas, Moreau-Christophe and Faucher were published. The date I f whole that is rejected and 'wildness' that emerges: 'It is work, it is would choose would be 22 January r840, the date of the official laziness, it is thoughtlessness, it is debauchery: it is everything except opening of Mettray. Or better still, perhaps, that glorious day, I order; the difference in occupations and debauches aside, it is the unremarked and unrecorded, when a child in Mettray remarked as I: life of the savage, living from day to day and with no tomorrow' he lay dying: 'What a pity I left the colony so soon' (Ducpetiaux, (La Phalange, r5 August r840). r852, 383). This marked the death of the first penitentiary saint. No doubt the analyses of La Phalange cannot be regarded as Many of the blessed no doubt went to join him, if the former representative of the discussions that took place in the workers' press inmates of the penal colonies are to be believed when, in singing at this time on crime and penality. Nevertheless, they are situated in the praises of the new punitive policies of the body, they remarked: the context of this polemic. The lessons of La Phalange were not 'We preferred the blows, but the cell suits us better.' I: quite wasted. They found an echo when, in the second half of the Why Mettray? Because it is the disciplinary form at its most nineteenth century, taking the penal apparatus as their point of extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive f attack, the anarchists posed the political problem of delinquency; technologies of behaviour. In it were to be found 'cloister, prison, I when they thought to recognize in it the most militant rejection of school, regiment'. The small, highly hierarchized groups, into which r the law; when they tried not so much to heroize the revolt of the the inmates were divided, followed simultaneously five models: that delinquents as to disentangle delinquency from the bourgeois legality of the family (each group was a 'family' composed of 'brothers' and and illegality that had colonized it; when they wished to re-establish 'i two 'elder brothers'); that of the army (each family, commanded by or constitute the political unity of popular illegalities. a head, was divided into two sections, each of which had a second in command; each inmate had a number and was taught basic military exercises; there was a cleanliness inspection every day, an inspection of clothing every week; a roll-call was taken three times a day); that of the workshop, with supervisors and foremen, who were responsible for the regularity of the work and for the appren- ticeship of the younger inmates; that of the school (an hour or an hour and a half of lessons every day; the teaching was given by the

292 293 Prison The carceral

instructor and by the deputy-heads); lastly, the judicial model (each the establishment of power relations; strong, skilled agricultural day 'justice' was meted out in the parlour: 'The least act of dis- workers are produced; in this very work, provided it is technically obedience is punished and the best way of avoiding serious offences supervised, submissive subjects are produced and a dependable is to punish the most minor offences very severely: at Mettray, a use- . body of knowledge built up about them. This disciplinary technique less word is punishable'; the principal punishment inflicted was exercised upon the body had a double effect: a 'soul' to be known confinement to one's cell; for 'isolation is the best means of acting on and a subjection to be maintained. One result vindicated this work of the moral nature of children; it is there above all that the voice of training: in r 848, at a moment when 'the fever of revolution fired the f ,I religion, even if it has never spoken to their hearts, recovers all its imagination of all, when the schools at Angers, La Fleche, Alfort, f emotional power' - Ducpetiaux, 1852, 377); the entire parapenal even the boarding schools, rose up in rebellion, the inmates of l I institution, which is created in order not to be a prison, culminates .Mettray were calmer than ever' (Ferrus). fI' in the cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters: 'God Where Mettray was especially exemplary was in the specificity i' I· sees you.' that it recognized in this operation of training. It was related to This superimposition of different models makes it possible to other forms of supervision, on which it was based: medicine, general I indicate, in its specific features, the function of 'training'. The chiefs education, religious direction. But it cannot not be identified abso- t and their deputies at Mettray had to be not exactly judges, or lutely with them. Nor with administration in the strict sense. Heads i teachers, or foremen, or non-commissioned officers, or 'parents', . or deputy-heads of 'families', monitors and foremen, had to live in · "11 but something of all these things in a quite specific mode of inter- close proximity to the inmates; their clothes were 'almost as humble' I..'. I'll vention. They were in a sense technicians of behaviour: engineers as those of the inmates themselves; they practically never left their , !.:..l; t ;-.'!;- of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality. Their task was to produce side, observing them day and night; they constituted' among them [,Ii bodies that were both docile and capable; they supervised the nine a network of permanent observation. And, in order to train them i or ten working hours of every day (whether in a workshop or in themselves, a specialized school had been organized in the colony. I' . I. the fields); they directed the orderly movements of groups of in- The essential element of its programme was to subject the future 'i, It I, mates, physical exercises, military exercises, rising in the morning, cadres to the same apprenticeships and to the same coercions as the going to bed at night, walks to the accompaniment of bugle and inmates themselves: they were 'subjected as pupils to the discipline' whistle; they taught gymnastics;' they checked cleanliness, super- that, later, as instructors, they would themselves impose'. They were vised bathing. Training was accompanied by permanent observa- taught the art of power relations. It was the first training college in tion; a body of knowledge was being constantly built up from the pure discipliner the 'penitentiary' was not simply a project that everyday behaviour of the inmates; it was organized as an instrument sought its justification in 'humanity' or its foundations in a 'science', of perpetual assessment: 'On entering the colony, the child is sub- but a technique that was learnt, transmitted and which obeyed

~\, jected to a sort of interrogation as to his origins, the position of his general norms. The practice that normalized by compulsion the ·1' family, the offence for which he was brought before the courts and conduct of the undisciplined or dangerous could,' in turn, by :1; all the other offences that make up his short and often very sad technical elaboration and rational reflection, De 'normalized'. The II. existence. This information is written down on a board on which \ disciplinary technique became a 'discipline' which also had its everything concerning each inmate is noted in turn, his stay at the school. colony and the place to which he is sent when he leaves' (Ducpeti- It so happens that historians of the human sciences date the birth aux, 185 r, 6x). The modelling of the body produces a knowledge of scientific psychology at this time: during these same years, it of the individual, the apprenticeship of the techniques induces modes . seems, Weber was manipulating his little compass for the measure-

;i' of behaviour and the acquisition of skills is inextricably linked with ment of sensations. What took place at Mettray (and in other

294 295 rl: qi Prison lp, The carceral ,1: ,1. European countries sooner or later) was obviously of a quite differ- penaliry. It was the most famous of a whole series of institutions I ent order. It was the emergence or rather the institutional specifica- '11' which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what tion, the baptism as it were, of a new type of supervision - both one might call the carceral archipelago. knowledge and power - over individuals who resisted disciplinary " Yet the general principles, the great codes and subsequent legisla- J11. normalization. And yet, in the formation and growth of psychology, ~ tion were quite clear on the matter: no imprisonment 'outside the the appearance of these professionals of discipline, normality and law', no detention that had not been decided by a qualified judicial subjection surely marks the beginning of a new stage. It will be said institution, no more of those arbitrary and yet widespread confine- that the quantitative assessment of sensorial responses could at least ments. Yet the very principle of extra-penal incarceration was in derive authority from the prestige of the emerging science of fact never abandoned. (A whole study remains to be done of the physiology and that for this alone it deserves to feature in the debates that took place during the Revolution concerning family "I' history of the sciences. But the supervision of normality was firmly courts, paternal correction and the right of parents to lock up their encased in a medicine or a psychiatry that provided it with a sort children.) And, if the apparatus of the great classical form of con- of 'scientificity'; it was supported by a judicial apparatus which, finement was partly (and only partly) dismantled, it was very soon i directly or indirectly, gave it legal justification. Thus, in the shelter reactivated, rearranged, developed in certain directions. But what is f' of these two considerable protectors, and, indeed, acting as a link still more important is that it was homogenized, through the media- between them, or a place of exchange, a carefully worked out tion of the prison, on the one hand with legal punishments and, on technique for the supervision of norms has continued to develop the other, with disciplinary mechanisms. The frontiers between right up to the present day. The specific, institutional supports of confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline, these methods have proliferated since the founding of the small, which were already blurred in the classical age, tended to disappear school at Mettray; their apparatuses have increased in quantity and • and to constitute a great carceral continuum that diffused peniten- scope; their auxiliary services have increased, with hospitals, schools, tiary techniques into the most innocent disciplines, transmitting public administrations and private enterprises; their agents have disciplinary norms into the very heart of the penal system and proliferated in number, in power, in technical qualification; the . placing over the slightest illegality, the smallest irregularity, devia- technicians of indiscipline have founded a family. In the normaliza- tion or anomaly, the threat of delinquency. A subtle, graduated tion of the power of normalization, in the arrangement of a power- carceral net, with compact institutions, but also separate and diffused knowledge over individuals, Mettray and its school marked a new methods, assumed responsibility for the arbitrary, widespread, era. badly integrated confinement ofthe classical age. [ I shall not attempt here to reconstitute the whole network that But why choose this moment as the point of emergence of the f' formed first the immediate surroundings of the prison, then spread , formation of an art of punishing that is still more or less our own? farther and farther outwards. However, a few references and dates ! Precisely because this choice is somewhat 'unjust'. Because it should give some idea of the breadth and precocity of the phenome- situates the 'end' of the process in the lower reaches of criminal law. non. I Because Mettray was a prison, but not entirely; a prison in that it There were agriculturai sections in the rnaisons centrales (the first contained young delinquents condemned by the courts; and yet example of which was Gaillon in 1824, followed later by Fontevrault, ! something else, too, because it also contained minors who had been "' Les Douaires, Le Boulard); there were colonies for poor, abandoned ~ charged, but acquitted under article 66 of the code, and boarders vagrant children (Petit-Bourg in 1840, Ostwald in 1842); there were \1' held, as in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to paternal :1 almshouses for young female offenders who 'recoiled before the idea correction. Mettray, a punitive model, is at the limit of strict of entering a life of disorder', for 'poor innocent girls whose

296 297 I~ '.1~ i\' Prison The carceral mothers' immorality has exposed to precocious perversity', or for remained separate in so far as they related to separate criteria and l[ poor girls found on the doorsteps of hospitals and lodging houses. authorities (court, penitence, confinement). Incarceration with its · .g There were penal colonies envisaged by the law of 1850: minors, mechanisms of surveillance and punishment functioned, on the acquitted or condemned, were to be sent to these colonies and contrary, according to a principle of relative continuity. The con- 'brought up in common, under strict discipline, and trained in tinuity of the institutions themselves, which were linked to one agricultural work and in the principal industries related to it;' later, another (public assistance with the orphanage, the reformitory, the they were to be joined by minors sentenced to hard labour for life penitentiary, the disciplinary battalion, the prison; the school with and 'vicious and insubordinate wards of the Public Assistance' (on the charitable society, the workshop, the almshouse, the peniten- all these institutions, cf. Gaillac, 99-107). And, moving still farther tiary convent; the workers' estate with the hospital and the prison). away from penality in the strict sense, the carceral circles widen and A continuity of the punitive criteria and mechanisms, which on the the form of the prison slowly diminishes and finally disappears basis of a mere deviation gradually strengthened the rules and altogether: the institutions for abandoned or indigent children, the increased the punishment. A continuous gradation of the established, orphanages (like Neuhof or Mesnil-Firrnin), the establishments for specialized and competent authorities (in the order of knowledge apprentices (like the Bethleem de Reims or the Maison de Nancy); and in the order of power) which, without resort to arbitrariness, still farther away the factory-convents, such as La Sauvagere, but strictly according to the regulations, by means of observation ji Tarare and Jujurieu (where the girl workers entered about the age of and assessment hierarchized, differentiated, judged, punished and thirteen, lived confined for years and were allowed out only under moved gradually from the correction of irregularities to the punish- surveillance, received instead of wages pledged payment, which ment of crime. The 'carceral' with its many diffuse or compact could be increased by bonuses for zeal and good behaviour, which forms, its institutions of supervision or constraint, of discreet sur- they could use only on leaving). And then, still farther, there was a veillance and insistent coercion, assured the communication of whole series of mechanisms that did not adopt the 'compact' prison punishments according to quality and quantity; it connected in model, but used some of the carceral methods: charitable societies, series or disposed according to subtle divisions the minor and the moral improvement associations, organizations that handed out serious penalties, the mild and the strict forms of treatment, bad assistance and also practised surveillance, workers' estates and marks and light sentences. You will end up in the convict-ship, the lodging houses - the most primitive of which still bear the all too slightest indiscipline seems to say; and the harshest of prisons says visible marks of the penitentiary systern.! And, lastly, this great to the prisoners condemned to life: I shall note the slightest irregu- carceral network reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that func- larity in your conduct. The generality of the punitive function that tion throughout society. • :-j the eighteenth century sought in the 'ideological' technique of :.i We have seen that, in penal justice, the prison transformed the representations and signs now had as its support the extension, the u punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archi- material framework, complex, dispersed, but coherent, of the various pelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the ~i r carceral mechanisms. As a result, a certain significant generality · :~ entire social body. With several important results. moved between the least irregularity and the greatest crime; it was no 1. This vast mechanism established a slow, continuous, imper- longer the offence, the attack on the common interest, it was the i ceptible gradation that made it possible to pass naturally from dis- departure from the norm, the anomaly; it was this that haunted order to offence and back from a transgression of the law to a slight the school, the court, the asylum or the prison. It generalized in departure from a rule, an average, a demand, a norm. In the classical the sphere of meaning the function that the carceral generalized in the period, despite a certain common reference to offence in general," sphere of tactics. Replacing the adversary of the sovereign, the the order of the crime, the order of sin and the order of bad conduct , social enemy was transformed into a deviant, who brought with him I,I r 298 299 .i ~T , Prison The carceral the multiple danger of disorder, crime and madness. The carceral The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a con- ~jl! network linked, through innumerable relations, the two long, fused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it "n'l multiple series of the punitive and the abnormal. '. seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what "II; 2. The carceral, with its far-reaching networks, allows the re- it punishes. It is unwilling to waste even what it has decided to cruitment of major 'delinquents'. It organizes what might be called i. disqualify. In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the ~ 'disciplinary careers' in which, through various exclusions and omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, ;'1U' rejections, a whole process is set in motion. In the classical period, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at there opened up in the confines or interstices of society the confused, least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual i: tolerant and dangerous domain of the 'outlaw' or at least of that imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence. I: which eluded the direct hold of power: an uncertain space that was Although it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency for criminality a training ground and a region of refuge; there I: is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, poverty, unemployment, pursued innocence, cunning, the struggle ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn. The prison is merely the ~ , against the powerful, the refusal of obligations and laws, and organ- . natural consequence, no more than a higher degree, of that hier- ized crime all came together as chance and fortune would dictate; I:, archy laid down step by step.The delinquent is an institutional I' it was the domain of adventure that Gil BIas, Sheppard or Mandrin, I: ·product. It is no use being surprised, therefore, that in a consider- I: each in his own way, inhabited. Through the play of disciplinary · able proportion of cases the biography of convicts passes through I: differentiations and divisions, the nineteenth century constructed , all these mechanisms and establishments, whose purpose, it is widely I rigorous channels which, within the system, inculcated docility and believed, is to lead away from prison. That one should find in them I produced delinquency by the same mechanisms. There was a sort of what one might call the index of an irrepressibly delinquent 'char- I disciplinary 'training', continuous and compelling, that had some- acter': the prisoner condemned to hard labour was meticulously pro- ( thing of the pedagogical curriculum and something of the profes- duced by a childhood spent in a reformatory, according to the lines sional network. Careers emerged from it, as secure, as predictable, of force of the generalized carceral system. Conversely, the lyricism as those of public life: assistance associations, residential apprentice- of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the 'outlaw', the ships, penal colonies, disciplinary battalions, prisons, hospitals, great social nomad, who prowls on the confines 'of a docile, fright- almshouses. These networks were already well mapped out at the ened order. But it is not on the fringes of society and through succes-. beginning of the nineteenth century: 'Our benevolent establish- sive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more ments present an admirably coordinated whole by means of which : closely placed insertions, under ever more insistent surveillance, by the indigent does not remain a moment without help from the cradle ·an accumulation of disciplinary coercion. In short, the carceral to the grave. Follow the course of the unfortunate man: you will .archipelago assures, in the depths of the social body, the formation I! see him born among foundlings; from there he passes to the nursery, of delinquency on the basis of subtle illegalities, the overlapping of the then to an orphanage; at the age of six he goes off to primary school latter by the former and the establishment of a specified criminality. and later to adult schools. If he cannot work, he is placed on the list _ 3. But perhaps the most important effect of the carceral system t of the charity offices of his district, and if he falls ill he may choose and of its extension well beyond legal imprisonment is that it sue- between twelve hospitals ... Lastly, when the poor Parisian 'ceeds in making the power to punish natural and legitimate, in reaches the end of his career, seven almshouses await his age and 'lowering at least the threshold of tolerance to penality. It tends to often their salubrious regime has prolonged his useless days well efface what may be exorbitant in the exercise of punishment. It does beyond those of the rich man' (Moreau de Jonnes, quoted in this by playing the two registers in which it is deployed - the legal Touquet). register of justice and the extra-legal register of discipline - against

300 301

'i I'I~': '. ., ~i

·i· 1 The carceral ii Prison ~ "~, each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. By ~ one another. In effect, the great continuity of the carceral system \ throughout the law and its sentences gives a sort of legal sanction means of a car cera I continuum, the authority that sentences infil- D, to the disciplinary mechanisms, to the decisions and judgements trates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, I that they enforce. Throughout this network, which comprises so improve. It might even be said that nothing really distinguishes v.' \', many 'regional' institutions, relatively autonomous and independent, them any more except the singularly 'dangerous' character of the is transmitted, with the 'prison-form', the model of justice itself. delinquents, the gravity of their departures from normal behaviour The regulations of the disciplinary establishments may reproduce and the necessary solemnity of the ritual. But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or iF the law, the punishments imitate the verdicts and penalties, the II; surveillance repeat the police model; and, above all these multiple educating. It receives from them, and from their lesser, smaller task, establishments, the prison, which in relation to them is a pure form, a sanction from below; but one that is no less important for that, unadulterated and unmitigated, gives them a sort of official sanction. since it is the sanction of technique and rationality. The carceral 'naturalizes' the legal power to punish, as it 'legalizes' the technical i The carceral, with its long gradation stretching from the convict- ship or imprisonment with hard labour to diffuse, slight limitations, power to discipline. In thus homogenizing them, effacing what may ~ communicates a type of power that the law validates and that justice be violent in one and arbitrary in the other, attenuating the effects of i uses as its favourite weapon. How could the disciplines and the revolt that they may both arouse, thus depriving excess in either of 1 power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely any purpose, circulating the same calculated, mechanical and dis- operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigat- creet methods from one to the other, the carceral makes it possible \ ing their intensity? When, by generalizing its effects and trans- to carry out that great 'economy' of power whose formula the t eighteenth century had sought, when the problem of the accumula- mitting it to every level, it makes it possible to avoid its full rigour? I Carceral continuity and the fusion of the prison-form make it tion and useful administration of men first emerged. -j i possible to legalize, or in any case to legitimate disciplinary power, By operating at every level of the social body and by mingling which thus avoids any element of excess or abuse it may entail. ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universal- I' But, conversely, the carceral pyramid gives to the power to ity of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished. The question is often posed as to .,! inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all n olj excess and all violence. In the subtle gradation of the apparatuses of how', before and after the Revolution, a new foundation was given h " discipline and of the successive 'embeddings' that they involve, the to the right to punish. And no doubt the answer is to be found in prison does not at all represent the unleashing of a different kind of the theory of the contract. But it is perhaps more important to ask power, but simply an additional degree in the intensity of a mechan- the reverse question: how were people made to accept the power to ism that has continued to operate since the earliest forms of legal punish, or quite simply, when punished, tolerate being so. The theory of the contract can only answer this question by the fiction punishment. Between the latest institution of 'rehabilitation', where '\ one is taken in order to avoid prison, and the prison where one is of a juridical subject giving to others the power to exercise over him sent after a definable offence, the difference is (and must be) scarcely the right that he himself possesses over them. It is highly probable perceptible. There is a strict economy that has the effect of render- that the great carceral continuum, which provides a communication ,I ing as discreet as possible the singular power to punish. There is between the power of discipline and the power of the law, and :j extends without interruption from the smallest coercions to the ":), nothing in it now that recalls the former excess of sovereign power \ when it revenged itsauthority on the tortured body of those about longest penal detention, constituted the technical and real, immedi- to be executed. Prison continues,on those who are entrusted to it, ately material counterpart of that chimerical granting of the right to a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on punish.

303 302 Prison The carceral

'ji' 4· With this new economy of power, the carceral system, which enables it to play this double role. By virtue of its methods of fixing, I"~ \ is its basic instrument, permitted the emergence of a new form of ! dividing, recording, it has been one of the simplest, crudest, also \ 'law': a mixture oflegality and nature, prescription and constitution, most concrete, but perhaps most indispensable conditions for the the norm. This had a whole series of effects: the internal dislocation development of this immense activity of examination that has objec- of the judicial power or at least of its functioning; an increasing tified human behaviour. If, after the age of 'inquisitorial' justice, we difficulty in judging, as if one were ashamed to pass sentence; a have entered the age of 'examinatory' justice, if, in an even more furious desire on the part of the judges to judge, assess, diagnose, general way, the method of examination has been able to spread so recognize the normal and abnormal and claim the honour of curing widely throughout society, and to give rise in part to the sciences or rehabilitating. In view of this, it is useless to believe in the good of man, one of the great instruments for this has been the multiplicity or bad consciences of judges, or even of their unconscious. Their and close overlapping of the various mechanisms of incarceration. immense 'appetite for medicine' which is constantly manifested _ I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. from their appeal to psychiatric experts, to their attention to the But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many chatter of criminology - expresses the major fact that the power profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been they exercise has been 'denatured'; that it is at a certain level governed conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain policy by laws; that at another, more fundamental level it functions as a of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and normative power; it is the economy of power that they exercise, useful. This policy required the involvement of definite relations of and not that of their scruples or their humanism, that makes them knowledge in relations of power; it called for a technique of over- pass 'therapeutic' sentences and recommend 'rehabilitating' periods lapping subjection and objectification; it brought with it new pro- of imprisonment. But, conversely, if the judges accept ever more cedures of individualization. The carceral network constituted one reluctantly to condemn for the sake of condemning, the activity of of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human judging has increased precisely to the extent that the normalizing sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, power has spread. Borne along by the omnipresence of the mechan- consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect isms of discipline, basing itself on all the carceral apparatuses, it has of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation. become one of the major functions of our society. The judges of 6. This no doubt explains the extreme solidity of the prison, that normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the slight invention that was nevertheless decried from the outset. If it teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social had been no more than an instrument of rejection or repression in worker' -judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative the service of a state apparatus, it would have been easier to alter its is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects more overt forms or to find a more acceptable substitute for it. But, to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achieve- rooted as it was in mechanisms and strategies of power, it could ments. The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, meet any attempt to transform it with a great force of inertia. One with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, fact is characteristic: when it is a question of altering the system of has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing imprisonment, opposition does not come from the judicial institu- j power. ';1 tions alone; resistanceis to be found not in the prison as penal sanc- ;U 5· The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture tion, but in the prison with all its determinations, links and extra- of the body and its perpetual observation; it is, by its very nature, judicial results; in the prison as the relay in a general network of the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the disciplines and surveillances; in the prison as it functions in a panop- new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of tic regime. This does not mean that it cannot be altered; nor that it knowledge that this very economy needs. Its panoptic functioning is once and for all indispensable to our kind of society. One may, on ii ,I'd 304 ':1 305 !I

;1' ;ii The carceral Prison

In 1836, a correspondent wrote to La Phalange: 'Moralists, the contrary, site the two processes which, in the very continuity of philosophers, legislators, flatterers of civilization, this is the plan of the processes that make the prison function, are capable of exercising your Paris, neatly ordered and arranged, here is the improved plan considerable restraint on its use and of transforming its internal in which all like things are gathered together. At the centre, and functioning. And no doubt these processes have already begun to a within a first enclosure: hospitals for all diseases, almshouses for large degree. The first is that which reduces the utility (or increases all types of poverty, madhouses, prisons, convict-prisons for men, its inconveniences) of a delinquency accommodated as a specific women and children. Around the first enclosure, barracks, court-- illegality, locked up and supervised; thus the growth of great rooms, police stations, houses for prison warders, scaffolds, houses national or international illegalities directly linked to the political for the executioner and his assistants. At the four corners, the and economic apparatuses (financial illegalities, information services, Chamber of Deputies, the Chamber of Peers, the Institute and the arms and drugs trafficking, property speculation) makes it clear that Royal Palace. Outside, there are the various services that supply the somewhat rustic and conspicuous work force of delinquency is the central enclosure, commerce, with its swindlers and its bank- proving ineffective; or again, on a smaller scale, as soon as the ruptcies; industry and its furious struggles; the press, with its economic levy on sexual pleasure is carried out more efficiently by sophisms; the gambling dens; prostitution, the people dying of the sale of contraceptives, or obliquely through publications, films hunger or wallowing in debauchery, always ready to lend an ear or shows, the archaic hierarchy of prostitution loses much of its to the voice of the Genius of Revolutions; the heartless rich ... former usefulness. The second process is the growth of the disci- Lastly the ruthless war of all against all' (La Phalange, 10 August plinary. networks, the multiplication of their exchanges with the penal apparatus, the ever more important powers that are given 1836). I shall stop with this anonymous text. We are now far away from them, the ever more massive transference to them of judicial func- the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, tions; now, as medicine, psychology, education, public assistance, pillories; we are far, tOO, from that dream of the reformers, less 'social work' assume an ever greater share of the powers of super- than fifty years before: the city of punishments in which a thousand vision and assessment, the penal apparatus will be able, in turn, to . small theatres would have provided an endless multi coloured repre- become medicalized, psychologized, educationalized; and by the sentation of justice in which the punishments, meticulously pro- same token that turning-point represented by the prison becomes duced on decorative scaffolds, would have constituted the permanent less useful when, through the gap between its penitentiary discourse festival of the penal code. The carceral city, with its imaginary and its effect of consolidating delinquency, it articulates the penal 'geo-politics', is governed by quite different principles. The extract power and the disciplinary power. In the midst of all these mechan- from La Phalange reminds us of some of the more important ones: isms of normalization, which are becoming ever more rigorous in that at the centre of this city, and as if to hold it in place, there is, their application, the specificity of the prison and its role as link are not the 'centre of power', not a network of forces, but a multiple losing something of their purpose. network of diverse elements - walls, space, institution, rules, dis- If there is an overall political issue around the prison, it is not course; that the model of the carceral city is not, therefore, the body therefore whether it is to be corrective or not; whether the judges, of the king, with the powers that emanate from it, nor the contrac- the psychiatrists or the sociologists are to exercise more power in it tual meeting of wills from which a body that was both individual than the administrators or supervisors; it is not even whether we and collective was born, but a strategic distribution of elements of should have prison or something other than prison. At present, the different natures and levels. That the prison is not the daughter of problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms laws, codes or the judicial apparatus; that it is not subordinated to . of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the \, the court and the docile or clumsy instrument of the sentences that proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them.

l ,\ \iII 307 306 .: \:, : .! ;' ... 1; !..... 11\:, Prison

I))' II it hands out and of the results that it would like to achieve; that it is .~ the court that is external and subordinate to the prison. That in the Notes central position that it occupies, it is not alone, but linked to a whole series of 'carceral' mechanisms which seem distinct enough _ since they are intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort - but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization. That these mechanisms are applied not to transgressions against a 'central' law, but to the apparatus of production - 'commerce' and 'industry' - to a whole multiplicity of illegalities, in all their diversity of nature

and origin, their specific role in profit and the different ways in PART ONE TORTURE which they are dealt with by the punitive mechanisms. And that ultimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary 1 The hody of the condemned functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of 1 The public execution of traitors described by William Blackstone, combat and the rules of strategy. That, consequently, the notions of Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4, 1766 9, 89. Since the institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are French translation was intended to bring out the humaneness of not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the English legislation, in contrast with the old ordinance of 1760, the . formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, French translator adds the following note: 'In this form of execution, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, 'sciences' which is so terrifying to see, the guilty man does not suffer much pain, that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this or for long.' central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of com- 2 In any case, I could give no notion by references or quotations what plex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple this book owes to Gilles Deleuze and the work he is undertaking with mechanisms of 'incarceration', objects for discourses that are in Felix Guattari. I should also have quoted a number of pages from R. Castell's Psychanalysme and say how much I am indebted to themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle. Pierre Nora. 3 I shall study the birth of the prison only in the French penal system. At this point I end a book that must serve as a historical back- Differences in historical developments and institutions would make a ground to various studies of the power of normalization and the detailed comparative examination too burdensome and any attempt to formation of knowledge in modern society. describe the phenomenon as a whole too schematic.

2 The spectacle of the scaffold

1 The name given to two fortresses in old Paris, the Grand and the Petit Chatelet, The first, demolished in 1802, was situated on the right bank of the Seine. It was the seat of the criminal jurisdiction of the viscounty and provostry of Paris. The second, on the left bank, near the Hotel-Dieu, served as a prison [Tr.]. 2 In the catalogues of judicial proofs, the confession appears in about the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Bernard of Pavia does not refer to it, but it is mentioned by Hostiemis. Crater's definition is character- istic: 'Aut legitime convictus aut sponte confessus.'

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