Instructions attached as well as readings. 

1. In your own words, explain post-structuralism and how you interpret its critique of mainstream IR theories (i.e Neo-Realism, Neo-Liberalism).  

2. Apply Foucault’s ideas about, and critique of, “Panopticism” to China’s use of mass surveillance.  

· What would Foucault say the purpose of mass surveillance is and what effect does it have on the greater Chinese populace?

· How does this “Panopticism” work in practice, as seen in the video on China’s use of mass surveillance?

Introduction: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies
Author(s): Richard K. Ashley and R. B. J. Walker
Source: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue: Speaking the Language
of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies (Sep., 1990), pp. 259-268
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies Association
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International Studies Quarterly (1990) 34, 259-268

INTRODUCTION

Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident
Thought in International Studies

RICHARD K. ASHLEY

Arizona State University

R. B. J. WALKER

University of Victoria

You will have understood that I am speaking the language of exile. This
language of the exile muffles a cry, it doesn’t ever shout . . . Our present age is
one of exile. How can we avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by
becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity? Writing is
impossible without some kind of exile.

Exile is already in itself a form of dissidence, since it involves uprooting oneself
from a family, a country or a language. More importantly, it is an irreligious act
that cuts all ties, for religion is nothing more than membership of a real or
symbolic community which may or may not be transcendental, but which always

constitutes a link, a homology, an understanding. The exile cuts all links, includ-
ing those that bind him to the belief that the thing called life has A Meaning
guaranteed by the dead father. For if meaning exists in a state of exile, it
nevertheless finds no incarnation, and is ceaselessly produced and destroyed in
geographical and discursive formations. Exile is a way of surviving in the face of

the dead father, of gambling with death, which is the meaning of life, of stub-
bornly refusing to give in to the law of death . . .

This ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse,

thought, and existence is . . . the work of a dissident. Such dissidence requires
ceaseless analysis, vigilance and will to subversion, and therefore necessarily
enters into complicity with other dissident practices in the modern Western
world.

For true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it has always been: thought.

Julia Kristeva

“A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident”

It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s
disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a
lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfold-
ing of a space in which it is once more possible to think.

Michel Foucault

The Order of Things

Guest Editors’ Note: We owe an enormous debt to the skills and labors of Deborah Johnston, who worked without
compensation as editorial associate in the production of this special issue. Her talents-especially her insistent,
theoretically informed questioning-have proven invaluable throughout all aspects of this issue. In addition, we
must express our gratitude to Hayward R. Alker, Jr. and Craig Murphy who served as referees and commentators
upon the articles collected here and whose painstaking, critical, and constructive comments have lent considerably
to the project.

?) 1990 International Studies Association

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260 Speaking the Language of Exile

Think, if you will, of all of those familiar times and places in modern life where
genres blur, narratives of knowing and doing intersect in mutually destabilizing
ways, contingency threatens to displace necessity, the very identity of the subject is
put in doubt, and human beings live and toil as exiles, deprived of any absolute
territory of being to call home. Think, in particular, of the marginal instances of:

the working mother who must daily pass back and forth across the mutually intrud-
ing, never stable frontiers of career-life and home-life-each with its own distinc-
tive, historically elaborated narratives of truth and meaning and each with its own
gender-marked implications for what the normal subject will naturally do and
therefore effortlessly be;

the draft-age youth whose identity is simultaneously claimed in national narratives of
“national security” and the universalizing narratives of the “rights of man”;

the disemployed laborer whose place in life is potentially crossed by both the narra-
tives of “class struggle,” which might inscribe for her an identity in opposition to
an international bourgeoisie, and the narratives of “national competition,” which
might inscribe for her an identity in opposition to the workers of other nations;

the woman whose very womb is claimed by the irresolvably contesting narratives of
“church,” “paternity, “”economy,” and “liberal polity”;

the alien worker, whose movement within a national territory is constrained by a
national narrative of “law,” but who at the same time is deprived of many of the
powers and protections attending a narrative of “citizenship”;

the newspaper editor who must put himself in the place of “the reader” in order to
decide what shall count as domestic news, international news, environmental news,
economics, sports, fashion, or non-news, but who, upon encountering an ambigu-
ous report, finds that he cannot come to rest with a single category because he
imagines multiple readers and multiple narratives in which the report finds mean-
ing;

the Chinese businessman in Malaysia who must bear witness to Malay narratives in
which he and other Chinese are described as “stingy” and “materialistic” even as
he must encourage his children to learn “Bahasa Melayu” (officially, “Bahasa Ma-
laysia”), the language in which the business of the state is conducted and the insults
are spoken;

the peace activist for whom a fearsome narrative of a future universal “end of time”
calls into question “nationalistic” narratives of state survival, but for whom, also, the
latter narratives continue powerfully to displace a narrative of “universal peace”;

the Santiago or Los Angeles barrio-dweller who finds himself amidst the narratives
of a “market” that fails to include him, the narratives of “honor” within a culture
now displaced, the narratives of “education” that promise to rectify and uplift
him, and the narratives of “law and order” that threaten to render him a criminal
object of police cudgels should education fail;

the participant in the environmental or cultural movement who subscribes to a
narrative of the inescapable “interconnectedness” of dispersed locales but who, at
the same time, would resist a narrative of “rationalization” that anticipates a neces-
sary progress toward a universal and uniform order; and

the contemporary Western statesman who, upon witnessing all those events con-
noted by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, greets this realization of his long ex-
pressed “fondest dreams” as a “nightmare” in which the West’s very identity and
purpose is suddenly put in doubt and the Western state is at a loss to find any
stable, already domesticated source of authority to represent.

These marginal sites are no doubt very different, but beyond noticing that they are
proliferating in modern global life today, we can say that they have at least four
things in common. First, these sites are intrinsically ambiguous. In none of these

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RICHARD K. ASHLEY AND R. B. J. WALKER 261

instances can one refer to a time and place sharply bounded, a homogeneous terri-
tory in which categories are fixed, values are stable, and common sense meanings are
sure. In none of these sites is there a unique and ultimate sovereign identity-be it
the identity of the individual or the institutional structures of a social whole or
community-to which one can appeal in fixing meanings and interpreting conduct.
Here the words “I” and “we” have no certain referent. Here, exiled from the certain
truths of every modern narrative of life, one can never confidently invoke an “every-
body who knows” because one can never be sure just who this “everybody” is. As a
result, one cannot speak as an economist might of rational individuals whose identi-
ties are given and who, in order to find their way and give meaning to their lives,
need only deploy their available means to serve their self-generated interests under
external constraints. One cannot speak as a moral philosopher might of the responsi-
ble human being who has a duty to ground his conduct in the transcendent princi-
ples of an ethical community. And one cannot speak as a sociologist might of social
actors who habitually replicate an eternal yesterday, measure their practices by refer-
ence to a recognized norm, or project social values already inscribed in a coherent
order.

Second, it follows that these marginal times and places are sites of struggle, where
power is conspicuously at work. They are deterritorialized sites where people con-
front and must know how to resist a diversity of representational practices that
would traverse them, claim their time, control their space and their bodies, impose
limitations on what can be said and done, and decide their being. This is not to say
that people here oppose some personified actor who, as external “enemy number
one,” administers power over them. Since the differences between inside and outside
are here uncertain, none can be clearly defined. This is also not to say that people
here resist power in the name of the life and freedom of some sovereign identity,
some community of truth, some absolute and identical source of meaning that is
victimized and repressed by power. In these sites, again, identity is never sure,
community is always uncertain, meaning is always in doubt. Instead, people here
confront arbitrary cultural practices that work to discipline ambiguity and impose
effects of identity and meaning by erecting exclusionary boundaries that separate
the natural and necessary domicile of certain being from the contingencies and
chance events that the self must know as problems, difficulties, and dangers to be
exteriorized and brought under control. Here, in other words, power is not negative
and repressive but positive and productive. Practices of power do not deny the
autonomy of subjects already present so much as they work to impose and fix ways of
knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous
being. They work to produce effects of presence, of identity, of a territorial ground
and origin of meaning. And they work by discriminantly reading and representing
ambiguous circumstances to impose differences between that which may be counted
as the certainty of presence and that which must be regarded as the absence beyond
its bounds.

Third, these marginal sites thus resist knowing in the sense celebrated in modern
culture, where to “know” is to construct a coherent representation that excludes
contesting interpretations and controls meaning from the standpoint of a sovereign
subject whose word is the origin of truth beyond doubt. In modern culture, it is the
male-marked figure of “man”-reasoning man who is at home and at one with the
public discourse of “reasonable humanity”-who is understood to be the sovereign
subject of knowledge. It is the figure of “man” who is understood to be the origin of
language, the condition of all knowledge, the maker of history, and the source of
truth and meaning in the world. And although in modern discourse this figure of
sovereign “man” is understood to exist in opposition to an ambiguous and indetermi-
nate history that here and now limits him, escapes his mastery, and eludes the

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262 Speaking the Language of Exile

penetration of his thought, modern discourse nonetheless invests in this figure of
“man” the promise of transcendence: through reason, man may subdue history,
quiet all uncertainty, clarify all ambiguity, and achieve total knowledge, total auton-
omy, and total power. This is the promise implicit in every claim of modern “knowl-
edge”-a claim always uttered as if by “man” and in the name of “man.” This, too, is
the promise that the disciplines of modern social science make-a promise of knowl-
edge and power on behalf of a universal sovereign figure of “man” whose voice a
discipline would speak. And this, as it happens, is the same promise that legitimates
the violence of the modern state-the promise, inscribed in a compact with “man,” to
secure and defend the “domesticated” time and space of reasoning “man” in opposi-
tion to the recalcitrant and dangerous forces of history that resist the sway of “man’s”
reason.

Yet it is characteristic of the marginal sites just considered that they resist knowing
in this sense and, in doing so, putjust this promise in doubt. They resist this modern
form of knowing because here, in these local times and places, the figure of “man” is
anything but an indubitable presence whose voice can be simply spoken in the
representation of people’s circumstances, intentions, and conduct. Any figure of
“man” whose sovereign right to speak truth might here be asserted is immediately
recognized as one among many arbitrary interpretations; it is seen as a knowledge-
able practice of power, itself arbitrarily constructed, that is put to work to tame
ambiguities, control meaning, and impose limitations on what people can do and
say.

Accordingly, from the various “central” standpoints of modern culture that would
speak the sovereign voice of “man,” the various marginal zones of life can be cast
only negatively, as a fearsome moment of abjection. To the extent that they resist the
imposition of some coherent “man-centered” narrative, these sites can be under-
stood only to signal an entropic moment, a moment that escapes “man’s” rational
control, a moment that spells the death of “man.” They can be regarded only as
moments that the modern person must endlessly defer or promise to master in the
name of a life, a truth, an identity in itself. Uncertainty, indeterminancy, darkness,
disorder, turbulance, irrationality, ungovernability, terror, and anarchy-these are
words that modern discourse uses to mark off these marginal places and times.
These words demarcate marginal places and times as voids of truth and meaning
that must be feared, exiled, and, if they persist, disciplined by the violent imposition
of the certain voices of truth they lack.

Fourth, while these various marginal times and places defy the control of modern
forms of knowledge-while they defy stable representation from the standpoint of
one or another unique figuration of sovereign “man” -it must not be thought that
they can be known only thus, as “voids” yet to be brought under control of “man’s”
reason. When one allows that these deterritorialized zones are multiplying so that it
can be said that “our present age is one of exile,” it makes sense to listen to the exiles
who live and move in these contested marginal zones, respecting the dissident prac-
tices they undertake. And when one listens in this way, it becomes plain that these are
proliferating times and places where exciting things of uncertain consequence are
happening in global political life. To be sure, the exiles might speak in wavering
timbre. After all, these are sites where the disciplining metaphysical faiths of modern
culture are put in doubt, constructs of sovereign “man” cannot be made practically
effective, and putatively objective boundaries of conduct authorized from sovereign
perspectives are seen not only to be arbitrary but also to produce a scarcity of
resources by which people might struggle to make life possible. People here are
disposed to question identity as much as they are inclined to be dubious of all
universal narratives and transcendental ends. If voices are here heard to flutter,
hesitate, and show doubt, however, the wavering cannot be equated with an anxious

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RICHARD K. ASHLEY AND R. B. J. WALKER 263

quavering. It cannot be equated with a fear of death that must be calmed by the
imposition of a certain identity and a universal narrative in which an identity might
secure an exclusionary territory to call home. For the questioning of “self” does not
here signal a “deficiency,” a “lacuna that must be filled.” Ambiguity and uncertainty
are not here regarded as sources of fear in themselves.

Ambiguity, uncertainty, and the ceaseless questioning of identity-these are re-
sources of the exiles. They are the resources of those who would live and move in
these paradoxical marginal spaces and times and who, in order to do so, must
struggle to resist knowledgeable practices of power that would impose upon them a
certain identity, a set of limitations on what can be done, an order of “truth.” They
are resources that make possible what Julia Kristeva (1986) would call the work of
“dissidence,” the politicizing work of thought. In Michel Foucault’s phrasing
(1973:386), they are indicative of the opening of “a space in which it is once more
possible to think.” Here, where identity is always in process and territorial bound-
aries of modern life are seen to be arbitrarily imposed, the limits authored from one
or another sovereign standpoint can be questioned and transgressed, hitherto closed-
off cultural connections can be explored, and new cultural resources can be culti-
vated thereby. Here it becomes possible to explore, generate, and circulate new,
often distinctly joyful, but always dissident ways of thinking, doing, and being politi-
cal.

We do not call attention to these proliferating marginal sites of modern politics in
order to highlight lapses in contemporary global political theory, some specific do-
mains of conduct that theorists have yet to take seriously enough. We do so in order
to suggest that these deterritorialized and decentered sites of political life already
have their counterparts at the margins of modern international studies. Kristeva
(1986:292) has suggested that “A spectre haunts Europe: the dissident.” We want to
suggest that for some years now, a “spectre” has haunted the “European continent”
of international studies. It is the spectre of a widely proliferating and distinctly
dissident theoretical attitude spoken in uncertain voice by women and men who, for
various reasons, know themselves as exiles from the territories of theory and theoriz-
ing solemnly affirmed at the supposedly sovereign centers of a discipline. It is the
spectre of a work of global political theory, a dissident work of thought, that happily
finds its extraterritorial place-its politicized “nonplace”-at the uncertain inter-
stices of international theory and practice.

These proliferating works of thought are not difficult to find. In the published
literature, more so in the informal xero-circuits of the field, and still more so in the
seminar papers of graduate students, one can detect an increasing volume and
variety of work whose principal business is to interrogate limits, to explore how they
are imposed, to demonstrate their arbitrariness, and to think other-wise, that is, in a
way that makes possible the testing of limitations and the exploration of excluded
possibilities. Some know their activity as reflection on ontology, on epistemology, on
methodology-on what many call the unspoken presuppositions of a discipline.
Some know their activity as exploration into the possibility of a post-positivist inter-
national relations discourse, a post-empiricist science of international relations, or a
critical theory of global politics. Others know their activity as a kind of history, albeit
one that does not aspire to remember an originary past but to expose and undo the
arbitrary practices by which “counter-memories” are forgotten in the construction of
a “necessary” present. Still others know their activity as attempts to set up a series of
relays between international relations theory, on the one hand, and European social
theory, feminist theory, and/or contemporary literary theory, on the other. And
many more simply do their works of thought, not pausing to give their works a name
but simply proceeding straightaway to a “ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the
workings of discourse, thought, and existence” in modern global life. However they

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264 Speaking the Language of Exile

are known and presented, moreover, these works of thought are to be heard insis-
tently questioning the time-honored dualisms upon which modern theory and prac-
tice have long pivoted. Identity/difference, man/history, present/past, present/fu-
ture, inside/outside, domestic/international, sovereignty/anarchy,, community/war,
male/female, realism/idealism, speech/language, agent/structure, particular/univer-
sal, cultural/material, theory/practice, center/periphery, state/society, politics/eco-
nomics, revolution/reform-these and countless other dichotomies have been exam-
ined in their practical workings, turned, rethought, and exposed as arbitrary cultural
constructs by which, in modern culture, modes of subjectivity, objectivity, and con-
duct are imposed.

As seen from the standpoints that would claim to occupy the center of a discipline,
it is true, these marginal works of thought are known primarily as indications of a
negativity: a crisis of confidence, a loss of faith, a degeneration of reigning para-
digms, an organic crisis in which, as Gramscians would say, “the old is dying and the
new cannot yet be born.” So cast, they are known to mark an interregnum, a time of
delay between paradigms. So cast, also, they are subject to the discipline implicit in
questions that modern theorists who long for a center, a secure source of meaning
guaranteed by a “dead father,” so readily ask. Can they not prove their merits by
configuring themselves as a new paradigm whose knowledge claims would bear a
promise of control in the name of “man?” If they aspire to be taken seriously, can
they not configure themselves as a theoretical counter-hegemony that could speak a
sovereign voice, assume a name, take a position, command a space, secure a home,
set down a law, and lay claim to the center of a discipline? The discipline is ready to
hear affirmative answers to these questions-answers that would affirm that the
study of international politics is indeed a business of making heroic promises on
behalf of a universal sovereign figure. To those works of thought that answer no, the
discipline turns a deaf ear when it can.

It is characteristic of these exile works of thought, though, that they will answer no.
For these dissident works are like the marginal sites discussed earlier in that they
resist assimilation to modern modes of knowing in the interest of the power of the
modern figures of sovereign man and sovereign state. They share the three other
features of these marginal sites as well. These dissident works of global political
theory move in intrinsically ambiguous sites, where respect for the play of difference
and the undecidability of history displaces the assertion of identity, including the
assertion of one or another interpretation of a universal identity of sovereign “man.”
They move in politicized sites where power is conspicuously at work and subject to
meticulous examination. And they constitute exciting works of experimentation and
exploration that would transgress arbitrary limits, open up hitherto closed off con-
nections, and enable the construction and circulation of new ways of knowing and
doing politics. Requiring “ceaseless analysis, vigilance and will to subversion,” these
marginal works of thought “necessarily enter into complicity with other dissident
practices in the modern Western world.”

The purpose of this special issue, then, is not to announce a new and powerful
perspective on global politics for which a discipline must make way. The contribu-
tions to this issue do not speak a sovereign voice or proclaim a credo. They do not
fabricate and ritualize a story of origins that would supply unity to these dissident
works of thought. They stake out no territory to be defended, no boundaries that
might separate citizens of a new discipline from those who are alien to it. They
neither write nor exemplify a manual of war by which soldiers of a new mode of
global political theory might be taught to seize, defend, and extend a domain. They
issue no promises. They bear no flag.

Our intention in these pages, on the contrary, is to provide an opportunity for a
public celebration of what these dissident works of thought already celebrate in

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RICHARD K. ASHLEY AND R. B. J. WALKER 265

countless scattered locales of research labor: difference, not identity; the questioning
and transgression of limits, not the assertion of boundaries and frameworks; a readi-
ness to question how meaning and order are imposed, not the search for a source of
meaning and order already in place; the unrelenting and meticulous analysis of the
workings of power in modern global life, not the longing for a sovereign figure (be it
man, God, nation, state, paradigm, or research program) that promises a deliverance
from power; the struggle for freedom, not a religious desire to produce some territo-
rial domicile of self-evident being that men of innocent faith can call home. Our
intention, too, is to enable the further circulation of the new strategies of question-

ing, analysis, and resistance that these works of thought have found to be effective in

one or another site and that might prove provocative and workable in other sites as
well. In short, we do not want to “shout,” as if a voice raised in International Studies
Quarterly might bespeak the arrival of a new movement that would storm and take
the capitols of international studies. We want instead to make it possible to listen
attentively to the “muffled cries” of dissidence that are already everywhere to be
heard.

The first contribution to this special issue, “Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration
of Difference,” by Jim George and David Campbell, reflects a patient labor of listen-
ing to the exiled voices of dissident scholarship speaking in a variety of widely
dispersed sites over the last decade. In spirit with the voices to which they listen,
George and Campbell resist the temptation to find in dissident scholarship the seeds
of a new orthodoxy. But they do highlight a variety of emergent questions that are
repeatedly engaged by dissident scholarship, whether it be a dissidence that one
might associate with Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Habermas or the
dissidence one might be inclined to label postmodern or poststructuralist. These are
questions bearing upon the Enlightenment constructs of history, rationality, objectiv-
ity, truth, human agency, and social structure; the relation between knowledge and
power; the relation between language and social meaning; the role and function of
the social sciences in modern social and political life; and the prospects for emancipa-
tory politics in the late twentieth century. Also in keeping with the voices to which
they listen, George and Campbell resist the temptation to memorialize a founda-
tional prehistory of contemporary dissident scholarship. Yet they do briefly review a
variety of contributions to contemporary social theoretical debates bearing on the
questionsjust mentioned-a variety that spans from Wittgenstein, Winch, and Kuhn
through the Frankfurt School, Habermas, Ricoeur, and Gadamer, to Derrida and
Foucault. They do so not to gesture toward a “coherent and consensual position,”
but to accentuate the lively and enlivening tensions that deprive the discipline of the
presupposition of an objectively given territorial ground, on the one hand, and
enable the opening up of spaces for thought, on the other. As George and Campbell
show in the latter part of their essay, these tensions have been productively exploited
in the variety of dissident works in international studies since the early 1980s.

The papers by James Der Derian, Bradley Klein, Michael Shapiro, William Cha-
loupka, and Cynthia Weber take advantage of the emergent thinking space to which
George and Campbell allude. These papers range across a variety of topics that are
no doubt familiar to readers of the Quarterly: surveillance, simulation and computer-
assisted war gaming, the acceleration of weapons delivery, alliance politics, arms
transfers, the local politics of ecological and anti-nuclear movements, the politics of
international debt, and the production and transformation of political institutions, to
name a few. Yet any attempt to introduce these papers and say what they must mean
would be to do violence to them. For while these papers range across topics with
familiar names, they do not approach them from the standpoint of some sovereign
subject, some center of interpretation with which authors and readers are one. They
do not pretend to project an originary word of truth and power beyond doubt, a

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266 Speaking the Language of Exile

voice of “man” that promises to settle the ambiguities of life once and for all. These
papers instead approach these topics in a manner that is respectful of the uncertain-
ties of life at the margins, where meaning is in doubt, the play of power is visible, and
the fixing of meaning is what practices of power visibly labor to do. They thereby
sensitize us to the politics involved in asserting a sovereign presence, giving names,
supplying representations, and saying what things mean-even in saying what these
papers mean. More than that, they sensitize us to the paradoxes involved in any
attempt to assert a sovereign voice in a world where the acceleration and agitation of
social activity gives rise to a proliferation of transgressions of institutional boundaries
and where, as a result, marginal zones of human labor expand relative to the suppos-
edly homogeneous territories that institutional boundaries would demarcate and
contain. Engaging the politics of such a world, these papers show that the refusal to
embrace one or another sovereign standpoint and its pretenses of territorial being
does not entail either a flight to a kind of idealism or a retreat to political passivity. It
instead enables a disciplined, critical labor of thought that takes seriously those
unfinalized power political struggles in which the question is no longer which sover-
eign shall win and which shall lose but how, if at all, a sovereign-centered territorial-
ization of political life can be made to prevail.

In offering this small collection of dissident analyses in the pages of “The Official
Journal of the International Studies Association,” we are of course sensitive to two
problems. One problem is that this collection, being small, inevitably excludes-or at
least fails to include-many, many voices of dissidence in international studies that
deserve equally to be heard and celebrated. Facing up to this problem, all we can say
is that we hope that the conduct of scholarship in the pages of this issue renders
somewhat less effective another widely replicated and far more worrisome form of
exclusion based not on physical limitations but on the supposed necessity of preserv-
ing institutional boundaries in the territorialization of political and scholarly life.

The second problem is that dissident scholarship, as Donna U. Gregory (1988:xiii)
has noted, is “more often attacked than read.” For example, one especially well
known line of attack, issued by Robert Keohane (1988:392), is that so-called “reflec-
tivists,” while skilled in critical arguments, “lack . . . a clear reflective research pro-
gram that could be employed by students of world politics.” As Keohane goes on to
say, “Until the reflective scholars or others sympathetic to their arguments have
delineated such a research program and shown in particular studies that it can
illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the
field, largely invisible to the preponderance of empirical researchers . . .” This is a
fine admonishment. It is as direct as it is succinct. It is delivered without the slightest
concealment of the privilege being arbitrarily accorded to a certain interpretation of
“empirical research,” of the policing function being performed, or of the punish-
ment that will come to those who fail to heed the admonishment delivered. But it
could not be offered or plausibly entertained by anyone who has actually read and
taken seriously the works of the “reflectivists” admonished1, as George and Campbell
and Der Derian make clear.

1 Or, for that matter, by anyone who has actually read and taken seriously Imre Lakatos’s (1970) most famous
article on scientific research programmes. To read Lakatos’s article through to the end is to see that it actually

develops as an elaborate sequence of deconstructions that proceeds from naive justificationist positions through a

variety of other positions to finally arrive at a “position” that Popperians find disconcerting because, as Lakatos

allows, it is grounded in nothing other than the arbitrary play of aesthetic practices. This last “position,” for all its

potential to disconcert the male-marked Popperian figure of the sovereign scientist, is one that many dissident

scholars would happily take seriously as a “starting point” for their “research programmes.” One might say, in fact,

that many already do and that to this extent they are far more faithful to Lakatos’s own argument than are

Keohane and many others who evoke the first few pages of Lakatos’s article and are amnesiac regarding the rest.

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RICHARD K. ASHLEY AND R. B. J. WALKER 267

There are, though, other critical readings of dissident scholarship that do deserve
a painstaking reply. In the essay concluding this issue, we shall consider a variety of
such critical readings and offer a response to them. Our intention, as will be seen, is
not to preempt or stifle criticism of dissident scholarship. Since dissident scholars
labor to expand the space and resources of thought, they would be the last to gainsay
any criticism of their work that would point out limitations to which they have
acquiesced or which they have covertly inscribed. As evidenced by the essays col-
lected here, in fact, dissident scholars exhibit a critical ethos, an ethics of freedom
disciplining their work, that encourages and welcomes criticism such as this. Our
purpose, instead, is to expose, analyze, and display the poverty of a widely replicated
strategy of reading dissident scholarship that functions to impose limitations on the
work of thought in reply to the hazards and opportunities encountered in all the
intrinsically paradoxical and ambiguous sites of contemporary global life. This
strategy of reading is “diversionary” in Keohane’s (1988:382) sense. It func-
tions, in his words, to “take us away from the study of our subject matter, world
politics.”

What is at stake is not just a matter of academic privilege. It is not a question of
whether dissident scholars shall be given their due or, alternatively, marginalized
and rendered “invisible.” What is at stake is nothing less than the question of sover-
eignty: whether or not this most paradoxical question, alive in all the widening
margins of a culture, can be taken seriously in international studies today. More
pointedly, the issue is whether and to what extent the discipline of international
studies will be able to exercise its critical resources to engage and analyze the prob-
lem of sovereignty and resistance to sovereignty as it unfolds in all the multiplying
deterritorialized zones of a culture in crisis-including that extraterritorial zone that
eludes sovereign representation called international politics.

It would be a mistake, however, to accentuate our critical analysis of a strategy of
reading dissident scholarship. As we argue in the concluding essay, this strategy is in
complicity with all those practices that work on the world scene to read ambiguous
circumstances, impose boundaries, and exclude paradoxes of space and time, thus to
domesticate territories of social and political life that male-marked figures of sover-
eign authority can be claimed to represent. As we also argue, though, this strategy of
reading is fast approaching exhaustion in international studies today, just as the
cultural resources that can be called upon to effect the territorialization of social and
political life are growing thin, more abstractly “philosophical,” less able to speak in
reply to the unsettled circumstances in which women and men actively undertake
their labors of self-making. In an important sense, the scholars contributing to this
special issue presume the weakening of this strategy of reading and disciplining
ambiguous happenings, both in international studies and in the world of politics
studied. They, like marginalized peoples everywhere, exploit the openings made
possible by this weakening.

Thus, while the contributors to this issue might occasionally cast a sideways glance
at instances of this strategy of reading, they refuse to be delayed or diverted by it.
They refuse to be seduced by a strategy of reading that would draw them into
abstractly theoretical discussions or self-enclosing simulations of idealized realities
that function only to redeem some notion of sovereign scholarly being. Instead,
these scholars do what, we suspect, scholars of international studies in general are
inclined to do. They get on with their work. They engage the intrinsically problemat-
ical realities of a world that affords few people today anything resembling a domestic
haven of self-evident being exempt from the play of power. Like all exiles from the
supposed sovereign territories of modern culture, these scholars undertake a critical
task, a task of dissidence to which Foucault (1984:50) has gestured. It is a task of

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268 Speaking the Language of Exile

working “on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for
liberty.”

References

FOUCAULT, M. (1973) The Order of-Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random
House.

FOUCAULT, M. (1984) What is Enlightenment? In The Foucault Reader, edited by P. Rabinow. New

York: Pantheon.

GREGORY, D. U. (1988) Foreword. International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World

Politics, edited by J. Der Derian and M. Shapiro. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
KEOHANE, R. 0. (1988) International Institutions: Two Approaches. International Studies Quarterly

32(4):379-96.
KRISTEVA, J. (1986) A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident. In The Kristeva Reader, edited by T.

Moi. New York: Columbia

University Press.

LAKATOS, I. (1970) Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In Criticism
and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
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All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

• Contents

p. [259]
p. 260
p. 261
p. 262
p. 263
p. 264
p. 265
p. 266
p. 267
p. 268

• Issue Table of Contents

International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep., 1990) pp. 259-417
Front Matter [pp. ]
Introduction: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies [pp. 259-268]
Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations [pp. 269-293]
The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed [pp. 295-310]
How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO [pp. 311-325]
Strategic Discourse/Discursive Strategy: The Representation of “Security Policy” in the Video Age [pp. 327-340]
Immodest Modesty: Antinuclear Discourse, Lifestyle Politics, and Intervention Strategies [pp. 341-351]
Representing Debt: Peruvian Presidents Belaunde’s and Garcia’s Reading/Writing of Peruvian Debt [pp. 353-365]
Conclusion: Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies [pp. 367-416]
Back Matter [pp. ]

I
I

t

I
I

)
J
1

Michel Foucault

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

The Birth ofthe Prison

Translated from the French

Alan Sheridan

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC . . NEW YORK

Contents

List of Plates
Translator’s Note

vii
ix

PART ONE TORTURE

I. The body of the condemned

.2.. The spectacle of the scaffold

3

32.

PART TWO PUNISHMENT

I. Generalized punishment

2..

The gentle way in punishment

73

I04

PART THREE DISCIPLINE

I. Docile bodies 135

The art ofdistrihutions 141

The control ofactivity 149

The organitation ofgeneses 1;6

The composition offorces 162.

2. The means of correct training

Hierarchicalohservation

170

Normaliting judgement 177

The examination 184

170

3· Panopticism 1)1;

–~~~”‘~ ,

PART FOUR PRISON

I. Complete and austere institutions

2. Illegalities and delinquency

3. The carceral

Notes

Bibliography

23 1

2~7 List of Plates

293

309

32 6 (between pages 169 and 170)

1 Medal commemorating Louis XlV’s first military revue in 1668.

2 Handwriting model.

3 Plan of the Panopticon by J. Bentham, 1843.
4 Plan for a penitentiary by N. Harou-Romain, 1840.

5 The Maison centrale at Rennes in 1877.

6 Interior of the penitentiary at Stateville, United States, twentieth
century.

7 Bedtime at the reformatory of Mettray.

8 Lecture on the evils of alcoholism in the auditorium of Fresnes
prison.

9 Steam machine for the ‘celeriferous’ correction of young boys and
girls.

10 L’ortlwpUie ou [‘art de prIYenir et de corriger dans les enfants les
difformitls du corps (Orthopaedics or the art of preventing and correct­
ing deformities of the body in children) by N. Andry, 1749.

Punishment

spectacle, sign, discourse; legible like an open book; operating by a
permanent recodification of the mind of the citizens; eliminating
crime by those obstacles placed before the idea of crime; acting
invisibly and uselessly on the ‘soft fibres of the brain’, as Servan put
it. A power to punish that ran the whole length of the social network
would act at each of its points, and in the end would no longer be
perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an
immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual. On the other
hand, a compact functioning of the power to punish: a meticulous
assumption of responsibility for the body and the time of the con­
vict, a regulation of his movements and behaviour by a system of
authority and knowledge; a concerted orthopaedy applied to con­
victs in order to reclaim them individually; an autonomous adminis­
tration of this power that is isolated both from the social body and
from the judicial power in the strict sense. The emergence of the
prison marks the institutionalization of the power to punish, or, to be
more precise: will the power to punish (with the strategic aim adop­
ted in the late eighteenth century, the reduction of popular illegality)
be better served by concealing itself beneath a general social func­
tion, in the ‘punitive city’, or by investing itself in a coercive
institution, in the enclosed space of the ‘reformatory’?

In any case, it can be said that, in the late eighteenth century, one
is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish. The
first is the one that was still functioning and which was based on the
old monarchical law. The other two both refer to a preventive,
utilitarian, corrective conception of a right to punish that belongs
to society as a whole; but they are very different from one another
at the level of the mechanisms they envisage. Broadly speaking, one
might say that, in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of
sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies
to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes
of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous,
irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the
sovereign and of his power. The reforming jurists, on the other
hand, saw punishment as a procedure for requalifying individuals
as subjects, as juridical subjects; it uses not marks, but signs, coded
sets of representations, which would be given the most rapid
circulation and the most general acceptance possible by citizens

13°

The gentle way in punishment

witnessing the scene of punishment. Lastly, in the project for a
prison institution that was then developing, punishment was seen
as a technique for the coercion of individuals; it operated methods
of training the body – not signs by the traces it leaves, in the form
of habits, in behaviour; and it presupposed the setting up of a
specific power for the administration of the penalty. We have, then,
the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative
apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise;
the vanquished enemy, the juridical subject in the process of re­
qualification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the
tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the
body subjected to training. We have here the three series of elements
that characterize the three mechanisms that face one another in the
second half of the eighteenth century. They cannot be reduced to
theories of law (though they overlap with such theories), nor can
they be identified with apparatuses or institutions (though they are
based on them), nor can they be derived from moral choices (though
they find their justification in morality). They are modalities accord­
ing to which the power to punish is exercised: three technologies of
power. ,

The problem, then, is the following: how is it that, in the end,
it was the third that was adopted? How did the coercive, corporal,
solitary, secret model of the power to punish replace the representa­
tive, scenic, signifying, public, collective model? Why did the
physical exercise of punishment (which is not torture) replace, with
the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs
of Dunishment and the orolix festival that circulated them?

13 1

Discipline

bon petit Henri’, but in the misfortunes of ‘little Hans’. The Romance
ofthe Rose is written today by Mary Barnes; in the place of Lance lot,
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
period a technique for constituting individuals as correlative ele­
ments of power and knowledge. The individual is no doubt the
fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is
also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I
have called ‘discipline’. We must cease once and for all to describe
the effects of power in negative terms: it’excludes’, it ‘represses’,
it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power
produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be
gained of him belong to this production.

Is it not somewhat excessive to derive such power from the petty
machinations of discipline? How could they achieve effects of such
scope?

3.

Panopticism

The following, according to an order published at the end of the
seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague
appeared in a town.!

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the dosing of the town and its
outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death,
the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct
quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under
the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he
leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed
day, ‘everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave
on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of
each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands
it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until
the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own
provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up
,between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each
person to receive his ration without communicating with the 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 oflittle
substapce who carry the sick, bury the dead, dean 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

of substance’, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every
quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most
absolute authority of the magistrates, ‘as also to observe all disorder,
theft and extortion’. At each of the town gates there will be an
observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the
intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the
syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have
anything to complain of; they ‘observe their actions’. Every day,
too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible;
stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the
windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allo­
cated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they
may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs
himself as to the state of each and every one of them – ‘in which
respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under
pain of death’; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic
must ask why: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough whether
dead or sick are being concealed: Everyone locked up in his
cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing
himself when asked it is the great review of the living and the
dead.

This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration:
reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to
the magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the ‘lock up’, the role
of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by
one; this document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone,
standing his condition’: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter,
another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic
to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during
the course of the visits – deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities­
is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates.
The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they
have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may
treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick
person without having received from him a written note ‘to prevent
anyone from concealing and dealing wi th those sick of the con taglon,
unknown to the magistrates’. The registration of the pathological
must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his

Panopticism

disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power,
the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it.

Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process
of purifying the houses one by one is begun. All the inhabi tants are
made to leave; in each room ‘the furniture and goods’ are raised
from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured
around the room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and
even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the
entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those who
have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry, ‘in
the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not
have something on their persons as they left that they did not have
on entering’. Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter
their homes.

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in
which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the
slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded,
in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and
periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according
to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is con­
stantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings,
the sick and the dead all this constitutes a compact model of the
disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is
to SOrt out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is

,transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which
is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays
down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his
death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient
power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even
to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes
him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the
plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power,

is one o(analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew
up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the
frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect,
individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the
figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite
different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the

196 197

Discipline

plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival,
but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of
regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the
mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary func­
tioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the
assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his
‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real
and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative
discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the
haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions,
crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear,
live and die in disorder.

If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to
a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the
great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary pro­
jects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of
people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing
distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control,
an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper was caught
up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his
doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those
sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partition­
ing in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects
of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great
confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other.
The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The
first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of
the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the
same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the
second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power
over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their
dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed through­
out with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town
immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in
a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the
perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at
least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the
exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws

Panopticism

function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in
imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines
functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underlying dis­
ciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of
confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from
all human contact, underlies projects of exclusion.

They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We
see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the
nineteenth century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which
the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen
and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of
power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague
victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the
confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analy­
tical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but
use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion – this is what
was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning
of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary,
the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the
hospitaL Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual

, control function according to a double mode; that of binary division
and branding (mad/sane; dangen;>us/harmless; normal/abnormal);
and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he
is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be
recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him
in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as
plague victims; the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed
on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of disci­
plinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring
into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The
constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which
every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by
applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different
objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions
for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into
play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague
gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are
disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter

198 199

Discipline

him, are composed those two forms from which they distantly
derive.

Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composi­
tion. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery,
an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with
wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peri­
pheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole
width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside,
corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the out­
side, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other.
All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower
and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man,
a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can
observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light,
the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are
like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is
alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic
mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see con­
stantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the prin­
ciple of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to
deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and elimin­
ates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture
better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

To begin with, this made it possible – as a negative effect – to
avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be
found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described
by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a
cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the
side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his compan­
ions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information,
never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room,
opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but
the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral

And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the in­
mates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at
collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad
reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of

Panopticism

contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing
violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no
copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers,
there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those dis­
tractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or
cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple
exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is
abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.
From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multipli­
city that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of
the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham,
60-64).

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate
a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the auto­
matic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveil­
lance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its
action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual
exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a
machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent
of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be
caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the
b~arers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the
prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little,
for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much,
because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham
laid down the principle that power should be visible and unveri­
fiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the
tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon.
Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being
looked at at anyone moment; but he must be sure that he may always
be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector
unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a
shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the
windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions
that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from
one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the
slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door
would betray the presence of the guardian. 2 The Panopticon is a

2.00 2.01

Discipline

machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peri ph­
eric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central
tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. 3

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindivi­
dualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as
in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes;
in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation
in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the
marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are
useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequili­
brium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises
power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the
machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his
visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not
matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the
malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who
wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of
those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more
numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater
the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious
awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous
machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces
homogeneous effects of power.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation.
So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good
behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy
to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.
Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light:
there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all
that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the
openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old ‘houses of security’,
with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple,
economic geometry of a ‘house of certainty’. The efficiency of
power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the
other side – to the side of its surface of application. He who is
subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsi­
bility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontane­
ously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in

Panopticism

which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle
of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may
throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the
more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and
permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any
physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

Bentham does not say whether he was inspired, in his project, by
Le Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles: the first menagerie in which the
different elements are not, as they traditionally were, distributed in
a park (Loisel, I 04-‘7). At the centre was an octagonal pavilion
which, on the first floor, consisted of only a single room, the king’s
salon; on every side large windows looked out onto seven cages
(the eighth side was. reserved for the entrance), containing different
species of animals. By Bentham’s time, this menagerie had dis­
appeared. But one finds in the programme of the Panopticon a
similar concern with individualizing observation, with characteriza­
tion and classification, with the analytical arrangement of space. The
Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man,
individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the
machinery of a furtive power. With this exception, the Panopticon
also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up
differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms ofeach indivi­
dual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the
effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among school­
children, it makes it possible to observe performances (without
there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess
characters, to draw up rigorous ciassifications and, in relation to
normal development, to distinguish ‘laziness and stubbornness’ from
‘incurable imbecility’; among workers, it makes it possible to note
the aptitudes of each worker, compare the time he takes to perform
a task, and if they are paid by the day, to calculate their wages
(Bentham, 60-64).

So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was
also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experi­
ments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experi­
ment with medicines and monitor their effects. To tryout different
punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character,
and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques

202 203

Discipline

to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try
out pedagogical experiments – and in particular to take up once
again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using
orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their six­
teenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or
girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could
learn anything; one would follow ‘the genealogy ofevery observable
idea’; one could bring up different children according to different
systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and
two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them
together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would
then have discussions that woule;! be worth a great deal more than
the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one
would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the
domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privileged place for
experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the
transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon
may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms.
In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that
he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, war­
ders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their be­
haviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will
even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector
arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the PanoDticon will be able to
judge at a glance, without
the entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed
as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the
director’s own fate entirely bound up with it? The incompetent
physician who has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent
prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an
epidemic or a ‘ “By every tie I could devise”, said the master
of the PanoDticon. “mv own fate had been bound up by me with

The Panopticon functions as a kind of
laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it
gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s beha­
viour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new
objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is
exercised.

Panopticism

The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment – the
differences are important. They mark, at a distance of a century and
a half, the transformations of the disciplinary programme. In the
first case, there is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary
evil, power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and
visible; it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it
partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and
the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is
reduced, in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats,
dualism of life and death: that which moves brings death, and one
kills that which moves. The Panopticon, on the other hand, must
be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of
defining power in terms of the everyday life of men. No

presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon
perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common

opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms
of torture, to be seen in Piranese’s engravings, the Panopticon
presents a cruel, cage. The fact that it should have given
rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or
realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed
for almost two hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be
understood as a dream building: .it is the diagram of a mechanism of
power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any
obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure archi­
tectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology
that may and must be detached from any specific’ use.

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners,
but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the
insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is
a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals
in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposi­
tion of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instru­
ments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemen­

.. ted in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is
dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a
particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema
may be used. It is – necessary modifications apart – applicable ‘to
all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large

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Discipline

to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are
meant to be kept under inspection’ (Bentham, 40; although Bentham
takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is because it has
many different functions to fulfil – safe custody, confinement,
solitude, forced labour and instruction).

In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exer­
cise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the
number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of

on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at
any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the
offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these
conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised
spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose
effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical
instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts
individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’.
schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its
economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity
by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its
automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power ‘in
hitherto unexampled quantity’, ‘a great and new instrument of
government , . . j its great excellence consists in the great strength
it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to
apply it to’ (Bentham, 66).

It’s a case of ‘it’s easy once you’ve thought of it’ in the political
It can in fact be integrated into any function (education,

medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the
effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can consti­
tute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of know­
ledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the pro­
cesses that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion
between ‘surplus power’ and ‘surplus production’. In short, it
arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not
added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the
functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase
their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The
panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange
between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making

Panopticism

power relations function in a function, and of making a function
function through these power relations. Bentham’s Preface to
Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his
‘inspection-house’: ‘Morals reformed – health preserved industry
invigorated- instruction diffused -public burthens lightened – Economy
seated, as it were, upon a rock the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws
not cut, but untied all by a simple idea in architecture!’ (Bentham,

39)·
Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its

enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the
outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the cen­
tral tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case,
he can gain a clear idea of the way in which the surveillance is practised.
In fact, any panoptic institution, even if it is as rigorously closed
as a penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected to such irregu­
lar and constant inspections: and not only by the appointed inspec­
tors, but also by the public; any member of society will have the

to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals,
factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the
increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate
into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically
controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘to tribunal
committee of the world’. 4 This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that
an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals,
also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers.

‘The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which
individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the
exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.

The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any
of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body;
its vocation was to become a generalized function. The plague­
stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect,
but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death, power
opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced to
its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the meti­
culous exercise of the right of the sword. The Panopticon, on the
other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power,
although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective,

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Discipline

it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a
threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to
increase production, to develop the economy, spread education,
raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.

How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from
impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and
regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator
of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of pro­
duction? How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase
those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The
Panopticon’s solution to this problem is that the productive increase
of power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised
continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest
possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these
sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the
exercise of sovereignty. The body of the king, with its strange
material and physical presence, with the force that he
or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme
new physics of power represented by panopticism; the domain of
panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region
of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements,
their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; what are required
are mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combina­
tions, and which use instruments that render visible, record,
differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple
power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the
king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations.
At the theoretical level, Bentham defines another way of analysing
the social body and the power relations that traverse it; in terms of
practice, he defines a procedure of subordination of bodies and forces
that must increase the utility of power while practising the economy
of the prince. Panopticism is the general principle of a new ‘political
anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty
but the relations of discipline.

The celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high tower,
powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a project of a
perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one
may ‘unlock’ the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused,

Panopticism

multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body. These
disciplines, which the classical age had elaborated in specific,
relatively enclosed places – barracks, schools, workshops – and
whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited
and temporary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of
transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be every­
where and always alert, running through society without interrup­
tion in space or in time; The panoptic arrangement provides the
formula for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an
elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning
of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary
mechanisms.

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the
discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the
edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions:
arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the
other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a
functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by
making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle
coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project
to the other, from a schema o( exceptional discipline to one of
a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation:
the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the
whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general
the disciplinary society.

A whole disciplinary generalization – the Benthamite physics of
power represents an acknowledgement of this had operated
throughout the classical age. The spread of disciplinary institutions,
whose network was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and
occupying above all a less and less marginal position, testifies to
this: what was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure,
or a singular model, became a general formula; the regulations
characteristic of the Protestant and pious armies of William of
Orange or of Gustavus Adolphus were transformed into regulations
for all the armies of Europe; the model colleges of the Jesuits, or the
schools of Batencour or Demia, following the example set by Sturm,

208 209

Discipline

provided the outlines for the general forms of educational dis­
cipline; the ordering of the naval and military hospitals provided
the model for the entire reorganization of hospitals in the eighteenth
century.

But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt
only the most visible of various, more profound processes.

I. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were
expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed popula­
tions, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now
they were being asked to playa positive role, for they were becom­
ing able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals.
Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting,
desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become
a basic technique to enable the army to exist, not as an assembled
crowd, but as a unity that derives from this very unity an increase
in its forces; discipline increases the skill of each individual, co­
ordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power,
broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, in­
creases the capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the work­
shop, while remaining a way ofenforcing respect for the regulations
and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase
aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral
influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in
terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into
an economy. When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial
schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the
justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor
who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance
of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a
living, and themselves having been badly brought up, they are
unable to communicate a sound upbringing that they themselves
never had’; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance of
God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny,
brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always
ready to stir up pUblic disorder and ‘virtually to exhaust the funds
of the H6tel-Dieu’ (Demia, 60-61). Now, at the beginning of the
Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be,
among other things, to ‘fortify’, to ‘develop the body’, to prepare

Panopticism

the child ‘for a future in some mechanical work’, to give him ‘an
observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits’ (Talleyrand’s Report
to the Constituent Assembly, 10 September 1791, quoted by Leon,
106). The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making
useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position
on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of
exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow
loosening of their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures.
Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and
most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some
of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission
of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine.
Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout

eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary insti­
tutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses.

2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one
hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms
have a-certain tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized’, to emerge
from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to
circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken
down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred
and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal
and specific function a role of external surveillance, developing
around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the
Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also
make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to
their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The
school tends to constitute minute social observatories that penetrate
even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the
bad behaviour of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext,
according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbours,
especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not
tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves,
to find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers,
whether they are determined to root out the vices of their children,
how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrange­
ments are; the visit may end with the giving of alms, the present of a
religious picture, or the provision ofadditional beds (Demia, 39-40).

2. II 2.10

Discipline

Similarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived of as a base for
the medical observation of the population outside; after the burning
down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that
the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced
by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in
the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert
to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to
give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed
of the sanitary state of the region. 5

One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the
form of enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation dis­
seminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity
organizations had long played this role of ‘disciplining’ the popula­
tion. From the Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the

monarchy, initiatives of this type continued to increase; their
aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid
and encouragement to work) or political (the struggle against dis­
content or agitation). One has only to cite by way of example the
regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. The
territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and
the members of the associations divided themselves up along the
same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas
regularly. ‘They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute, tobacco
shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy, im­
piety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.’
They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the
information to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability
of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments,
knowledge of a trade, morality (and ‘whether they have not fallen
into poverty through their own fault’); lastly, ‘one must learn by
skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there
is peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are care­
ful to bring up their children in the fear of God … whether they do
not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together and
with them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery
in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has any
doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their
marriage certificate’. 5

Panopticism

3. The state-control ofthe mechanisms ofdiscipline. In England, it
was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the
functions of social discipline (cf. Radzinovitz, 203-14); in France,
although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds
or charity associations, another – and no doubt the most important
part – was very soon taken over by the police apparatus.

The organization of a centralized police had long been regarded,
even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression of royal
absolutism; the sovereign had wished to have ‘his own magistrate to
whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, inten­
tions, and who was entrusted with the execution of orders and
orders under the King’s private seal’ (a note by Duval, first secretary
at the police magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, I). In effect,
in taking over a number of pre-existing functions – the search for
. criminals, urban surveillance, economic and political supervision ­
the police magistratures and the magistrature-general that presided
over them in Paris transposed them into a single, strict, administra­
tive machine: ‘All the radiations of force and information that

, spread from the circumference culminate in the magistrate-general.
..• It is he who operates all the wheels that together produce order
and harmony. The effects of his administration cannot be better
compared than to the movement of the celestial bodies’ (Des
Essarts, 344 and 528).

But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized
in the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly
linked directly to the centre of political sovereignty, the type of
power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements
to which it applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be
coextensive with the entire social body and not only by the extreme
limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is
concerned with. Police power must bear ‘over everything’: it is not
however the totality of the state nor of the kingdom as visible and

. invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust of events, actions,
, behaviour, opinions ‘everything that happens’;7 the police are
concerned with ‘those things of every moment’, those ‘unimportant
things’, of which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction
(Supplement to the Instruction for the drawing up ofa new code, 1769,
article )3)). With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a

21 3
212

Discipline

supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle,
the most passing phenomenon of the social body: ‘The ministry of
the magistrates and police officers is of the greatest importance; the
objects that it embraces are in a sense definite, one may perceive
them only by a sufficiently detailed examination’ (Delamare, un­
numbered Preface): the infinitely small of political power.

And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the
instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance,
capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisi­
ble. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole
social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted
everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized
network which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the
forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the ‘observers’,
who were paid regularly, the ‘basses mouches’, or secret agents, who
were paid by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job
done, and finally the prostitutes. And this unceasing observation
had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout
the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered
society by means of a complex documentary organization (on the
police registers in the eighteenth century, cf. Chassaigne). And,
unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was
registered in this way were forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibili­
ties, suspICIons a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour.

Now, it should be noted that, although this police supervision
was entirely ‘in the hands of the king’, it did not function in a single
direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond,
by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes
of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations
from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the
king’~s private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal
rule and which brought detention into disrepute. on political
grounds, were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables,
neighbours, parish priests; and their function was to punish by
confinement a whole infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, dis­
obedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude
from his architecturally perfect city and which he called ‘offences of
non-surveillance’. In short, the eighteenth-century police added a

Panopticism

disciplinary function to its role as the auxiliary of justice in the
pursuit of criminals and as an instrument for the political supervision
of plots, opposition movements or revolts. It was a complex func­
tion since it linked the absolute power of the monarch to the lowest
levels of power disseminated in society; since, between these differ­
ent, enclosed institutions of discipline (workshops, armies, schools),
it extended an intermediary network, acting where they could not
intervene, disciplining the non-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in
the gaps, linked them together, guaranteed with its armed force an
interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline. ‘By means of a wise
police, ,the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience’
(Vattel, 162).

The organization of the police apparatus in the eighteenth century
sanctioned a generalization of t~e disciplines that became co-exten­
sive with the state itself. Although it was linked in the most explicit
way with everything in the royal power that exceeded the exercise
of regular justice, it is understandable why the police offered such
slight resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial power; and why

. it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with ever­
increasing weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt
because it is the secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also because,
to a far greater degree than the ‘judicial institution, it is identified,
by reason of its extent and mechanisms, with a society of the
disciplinary type. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the dis­
ciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for all
by a state apparatus.

‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with
an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, com­
prising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of
application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a
technology. And it may be taken over either by ‘specialized’ institu­
tions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of the nineteenth
century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a

. particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities
that ·find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal
mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial
relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become ‘disci­
plined’, absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first

21) 214

Discipline

educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological,
which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for
the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal); or by
apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal
functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus
from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose
major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns
over society as a whole (the police).

On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a
disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the
enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely
generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disci­
plinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because
it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but
serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together,
extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects
of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an
infinitesimal distribution of the power relations.

A few years after Bentham, Julius gave this society its
certificate (Julius, 384-6). Speaking of the panoptic principle, he
said that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity:
it was an event in the ‘history of the human mind’. In appearance,
it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a
whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of
spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection
of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the
architecture of temples, theatres and circuses responded. With
spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity of
festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed,
society found new vigour and formed for a moment a single great
body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure
for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous
view of a great multitude.’ In a society in which the principal
elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the
one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations
can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the
spectacle: ‘It was to the modern age, to the ever-growing influence
of the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details

. Panopticism

and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of
increasing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing
towards that great aim the building and distribution of buildings
intended to observe a great multitude of men at the same time.’

Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had
described as a technical programme. Our society is one not of
spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one
invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange,
there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces;
the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation
and a .centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines
anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the
individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is
rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a
whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than
we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage,
‘but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which
we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The

. importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character
probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of
the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical,
permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. He is the individual who
looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however
minute, can escape: ‘You may consider that no part of the Empire
is without surveillance, no crime, no offence, no contravention that
remains unpunished, and that the eye of the genius who can en­
lighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without, how­
ever, the slightest detail escaping his attention’ (Treilhard, 14). At
the moment of its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still
assumes with the Emperor the old aspect of the ,power of spectacle.
As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the
ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined
into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process
by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular
manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily
exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of
intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and
the sun.

21 7 2.16

Discipline

The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a
number of broad historical processes – economic, juridico-political
and, lastly, scientific – of which it forms part.

I. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are
techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is
true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this:
every system of power is presented with the same problem. But the
peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to
the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly,
to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economic­
ally, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion,
its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it
arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their
maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without
either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this ‘economic’ growth of
power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military,
industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to
increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the
system. This triple objective of the disciplines corresponds to a
well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture
was the large demographic thrust of the eighteenth century; an
increase in the floating population (one of the primary objects of
diScipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change of
quantitative scale in the groups to be supervised or manipulated
(from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eve of the
French Revolution, the school population had been increasing
rapidly, as had no doubt the hospital population; by the end of the
eighteenth century, the peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men).
The other aspect of the conjuncture was the growth in the apparatus
of production, which was becoming more and more extended and
complex; it was also becoming more costly and its profitability had
to be increased. The development of the disciplinary methods
corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no doubt, to the new
need to adjust their correlation. Neither the residual forms of feudal
power nor the structures of the administrative monarchy, nor the
local mechanisms of supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass
they all formed together could carry out this role: they were
hindered from doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension of

Panopticism

their network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all
by the ‘costly’ nature of the power that was exercised in them. It
was costly in several senses; because directly it cost a great deal to
the Treasury; because the system of corrupt offices and farmed-out
taxes weighed indirectly, but very heavily, on the population;
because the resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle of per­
petual reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying
(levying on money or products by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical
taxation; . levying on men or time by corvees of press-ganging, by
locking up or banishing vagabonds). The development of the disci­
pline~ marks the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to
a quite different economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of
proceeding by deduction, are integrated into the productive effi­
ciency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this
efficiency and into the use of what it produces. For the old principle
of ‘levying-violence’, which governed the economy of power, the
disciplines substitute the principle of ‘ mildness-product ion-profit’.
These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multi­
plicity of men and the multiplication of the apparatuses of produc­
tion (and this means not only ‘production’ in the strict sense, but
also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the
. production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructive
force in the army).

In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of
problems for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently
equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena:
reduce what,in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than
a unity; reduce what is opposed to the use of each of its elements
and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages
of number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates
movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings
of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways;
it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the
forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized
multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that
spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that
wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations,
coalitions anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.

218
21 9

Discipline

Hence the fact that the disciplines use procedures of partitioning
and verticality, that they introduce, between the different elements
at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define
compact hierarchical networks, in short, that they oppose to the
intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continu­
ous, individualizing pyramid. They must also increase the particlllar
utility of each element of the multiplicity, but by means that are the
most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multi­
plicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence, in order to
extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those
overall methods known as time-tables, collective training, exercises,
total and detailed surveillance. Furthermore, the disciplines must
increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each
is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is in
order to increase the utilizable effects of the multiple that the disci­
plines define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment of bodies,
gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal co­
ordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines
have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside
the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well
articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in
the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous
instruments of power, coextensive with the multiplicity that they
regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration,
perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a
power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise
it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied;
to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to
deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disci­
plines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it
possible to increase the useful size of multiplicities by decreasing the
inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them -useful,
must control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a
nation, an army or a school, reaches the threshold of a discipline
when the relation of the one to the other becomes favourable.

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques
that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be
said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men

Panopticism

made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual,
costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were
superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact,
the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation
of capital – cannot be separated; it would not have been possible
to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth
of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and
using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative
multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital.
At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus
of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of the
disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations
(cf. Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter XIII and the very interesting
analysis in Guerry and Deleule). Each makes the other possible and
necessary; each provides a model for the other. The disciplinary
pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the

. separation, coordination and supervision of tasks was imposed and
made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures and
bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be
transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of
production; the massive projection of military methods onto indus­
trial organization was an exam pte of this modelling of the division
of labour following the model laid down by the schemata of power.
But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of
production, its ‘mechanical’ breaking-down, were projected onto
the labour force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution
of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that
they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore
increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline
is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’
force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth
of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disci­
plinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting
forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated
in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions.

2. The panoptic modality of power – at the elementary, tech­
nical, merely physical level at which it is situated – is not under
the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great

220 221

Discipline

juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not
absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the
bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politi­
cally dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit,
coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible
by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But
the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms
constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general
juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egali­
tarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical
mechanisms, by all those systems of micr0-power that are essentially
non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And
although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it pos­
sible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of
all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines
provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and
bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of
the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded
as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism
constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion.
It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society,
in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in
opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The
‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the
disciplines.

In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an
infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to
the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods
of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these

demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on
a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more
indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter­
law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asym­
metries and excluding reciprocities. First, because discipline creates
between individuals a ‘private’ link, which is a relation of constraints
entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a
discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is
imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-reversible

Panopticism

subordination of one group of people by another, the ‘surplus’
power that is always fixed on the same side, the inequality of posi­
tion of the different ‘partners’ in relation to the common regulation,
all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link,
and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically
from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline.
We know, for example, how many real procedures undermine the
legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is not the
least important. Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define
juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines
characterize, classify, specialize;. they distribute along a scale,
around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another
and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space
and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring

the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension
law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular

and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a
‘counter-law’. And, although the universal juridicism of modern
society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally
widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of
the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which sup­
ports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and under­
mines the limits that are traced around the law. The minute disci­
plines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level
of emergence of the great apparatuses and the great political
struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been,
with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart
of the juridical norms according to which power was redistributed.
Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long
to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant
tricks that it has invented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a
respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot
find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very
foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas
they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations
definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them
as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they
are a set of physico-political techniques.

222 223

Discipline

To return to the problem of legal punishments, the prison with
all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the
point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary
power to observe; at the point where the universal punishments of
the law are applied selectively to certain individuals and always the
same ones; at the point where the redefinition of the juridical subject
by the penalty becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point
where the law is inverted and passes outside itself, and where the
counter-law becomes the effective and institutionalized content of
the juridical forms. What generalizes the power to punish, then, is
not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject;
it is the regular extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic
techniques.

3. Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long
history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century,
was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level
at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power
regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. At this point,
the disciplines crossed the ‘technological’ threshold. First the
hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not sim­
ply ‘reordered’ by the disciplines; they became, thanks to them,
apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification could be
used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of
power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge;
it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made
possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical
medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology,
the rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an episte­
mological ‘thaw’ through a refinement of power relations; a
multiplication of the effects of power through the formation
and accumulation of new forms of knowledge.

The extension of the disciplinary methods is inscribed in a broad
historical process: the development at about the same time of many
other technologies – agronomical, industrial, economic. But it must
be recognized that, compared with the mining industries, the
emerging chemical industries or methods of national accountancy,
compared with the blast furnaces or the steam engine, panopticism
has received little attention. It is regarded as not much more than a

Panopticism

bizarre little utopia; a perverse dream rather as though Bentham
had been the Fourier of a police society, and the Phalanstery had
taken on the form of the Panopticon. And yet this represented
abstract formula of a very real technology, that of individuals.
There were many reasons why it received little praise; the most
obvious is that the discourses to which it gave rise rarely acquired,
except in the academic classifications, the status of sciences; but the
real reason is no doubt that the power that it operates and which it
augments is a direct, physical power that men exercise upon one
another. An inglorious culmination had an origin that could be
only grudgingly acknowledged. But it would be unjust to compare
the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine
or Amici’s microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they
are much more. If a historical equivalent or at least a point of
comparison had to be found for them, it would be rather in the
‘inquisitorial’ technique.

The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and
the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial
investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investiga­
tion procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had
developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the
increase of the princely states i~ the twelfth and thirteenth cen­
turies. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the juris­
prudence first of the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts.
The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed
or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures of the oath,
the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the
transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the
sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth
by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investiga­
tion has since then been an integral part of western justice (even up
to our own day), one must not forget either its political origin, its

. link with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or
its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge. In
fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental
element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the
juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which, as
we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages.

224
225

Discipline

It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics were born
from techniques of measurement; the sciences of nature, in any case,
were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the
practices of investigation. The great empirical knowledge that
covered the things of the world and transcribed them into_ the
ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and
establishes the ‘facts’ (at a time when the western world was begin­
ning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had
its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition – that immense
invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses
of our memory. But what this politico-juridical, administrative and
criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of
nature, disciplinary analysis has been to the sciences of man. These
sciences, which have so delighted our ‘humanity’ for over a century,
have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the
disciplines and their investigations. These investigations are perhaps
to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many
other strange sciences, what the terrible power of investigation was
to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or the earth.
Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold of the classi­
cal age, Bacon, lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a methodology
of investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great Observer
will produce the methodology of examination for the human
sciences? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible. For,
although it is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical
sciences, the investigation has detached itself from the inquisitorial
procedure, in which it was historically rooted, the examination has
remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it.
It has always been and still is an intrinsic element of the disciplines.
Of course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by
integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry.
And, in effect, its appearance in the form of tests, interviews,
interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify
the mechanisms of discipline: educational psychology is supposed to
correct the rigours of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric
interview is supposed to rectify the effects of the discipline of work.
But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals
from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in

Panopticism

a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge
proper to each discipline (on this subject, cf. Tort). The great
investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become
detached from its politico-juridical model; the examination, on the
other hand, is still caught up in disciplinary technology.

In the Middle Ages, the procedure of investigation gradually
superseded the old accusatory justice, by a process initiated from
above; the disciplinary technique, on the other hand, insidiously
and as if from below, has invaded a penal justice that is still, in
principle, inquisitorial. All the movements of extension that
characterize modern penality problematization of the criminal
behind his crime, the concern with a punishment that is a correction,
a therapy, a normalization, the division of the act of judgement
between various authorities that are supposed to measure, assess,
diagnose, cure, transform individuals – all this betrays the penetra­
tion of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition.

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application,
its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set
up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject
of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The
extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the
infinite segmentation of the body’ of the regicide: a manifestation
of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal,
whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The
ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an
interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended

to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation,
a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file
that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would
be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a proce­
dure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a
gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic move­
ment that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the
logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The
practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural exten­
sion of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination
procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular
chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and

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,

Prisonbarracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

228

Notes

10 The Quakers certainly also knew the Rasphuis and Spinhuis of
Amsterdam. Cf. Sellin, 109-10. In any case, Walnut Street Prison was
a continuation of the Almshouse opened in 1767 and of the penal
legislation that the Quakers had wished to impose despite the English
administration.

I I On the disorders caused by this law, cf. Rush, 5-9 and Vaux, 45. It
should be noted that in the report by J. 1. Siegel, which had inspired
the Rasphuis of Amsterdam, it was envisaged that penalties would not
be proclaimed publicly, that prisoners would be brought into the
prison at night, that warders would swear not to reveal their identity
and that no visits would be permitted (Sellin, 27-8).

12 B. Rush, who was one of the inspectors, notes after a visit to Walnut
Street: ‘Moral cares: preaching, reading of good books, cleanliness of
clothes and rooms, baths; one does not raise one’s voice, little wine,
as little tobacco as possible, little obscene or profane conversation.
Constant work: the gardens taken care of; it is beautiful: 1,200 head of
cabbage’ (in Teeters, 1935,50).

13 Rush, 14. This idea of an apparatus for transforming human beings
is already to be found in Hanway’s project for a ‘reformatory’: ‘The
idea of a hospital and that of a malefactor are incompatible; but let us
try to make the prison an authentic and effective reformatory, instead
of it being like the others a school of vice’ (Hanway, 52).

14 Cf. the criticism made by Rush of punitive spectacles, in particular
those imagined by Dufriche du Valaze (Rush, 5-9)’

PART THREE DISCIPLINE

I Docile hodies

I I shall choose examples from military, medical, educational and
industrial institutions. Other examples might have been taken from
colonization, slavery and child rearing.

2 Cf. what La Metherie wrote after a visit to Le Creusot: ‘The buildings
for so fine an establishment and so large a quantity of different work
should cover a sufficient area, so that there will be no confusion among
the workers during working time’ (La Metherie, 66).

3 J.-B. de la Salle, Conduite des ecoles chritiennes, B.N. Ms. 11759, 248-9.
A little earlier Batencour proposed that classrooms should be divided
into three parts: ‘The most honourable for those who are learning
Latin… It should be stressed that there are as many places at the
tables as there will be writers, in order to avoid the confusion usually
caused by the lazy.’ In another, those who are learning to read: a bench

314

Notes

for the rich and a bench for the poor ‘so that vermin will not be passed
on’. A third section for newcomers: ‘When their ability has been
recognized, they will be given a place’ (M.I.D.B., 56-7).

4 The success of the Prussian troops can only be attributed to the
‘excellence of their discipline and their exercise; the choice of exercise
is not therefore a matter of indifference; in Prussia the subject has been
studied for forty years with unremitting application’ (Saxe, II,
249)·
Writing exercise: ‘•.. 9: Hands on the knees. This command is con­
veyed by one ring on the bell; 10: hands on the table, head up; I I:
clean the slates: everyone cleans his slate with a little saliva, or better
still with a piece of rag; 12: show the slates; 13: monitors, inspect.
They inspect the slates with their assistants and then those of their
own bench. The assistants inspect those of their own bench and every­
one returns to his own place.’

6 This mixture appears clearly in certain classes of the apprenticeship
contract: the master is obliged to give his pupil – in exchange for his
money and his labour – all his knowledge, without keepi9’g any secret
from him; otherwise, he is liable to a fine. Cf., for example, Grosre­
naud,62.

7 F. de la Noue recommended the creation of military academies at the
end of the sixteenth century, suggesting that one should learn in them
‘how to handle horses, to practise with the dagger, with and without
shield, to fence, to perform on horseback, to jump; if swimming and
wrestling were added, it would be to the good, for all this makes the
person robust and more subtle’ (Noue, 181-2).

8 Through the schools at Liege, Devenport, Zwolle, Wesel; and thanks
also to Jean Sturm and his memorandum of In8 for the organization
of a gymnasium at Strasburg. Cf. Bulletin de la societe d’histoire du
protestantisme, xxv, 499-505.

It should be noted that the relations between the army, religious
organization and education are very complex. The ‘decury’, the unit of
the Roman army, is to be found in Benedictine monasteries, as the
unit of work and no doubt of supervision. The Brothers of the Com­
mon Life borrowed it and adapted it to their own education organiza­
tion: the pupils were grouped in. tens. It was this unit that the Jesuits
took up in the scenography of their schools, thus reintroducing a
military model. But the decury was replaced in turn by an even more
military schema, with ranks, columns, lines.

9 Guibert, 18. In fact, this very old problem came into the forefront
once more in the eighteenth century, for the economic and technical

31 ;

Notes

reasons that we are about to see; and the ‘prejudice’ in question had
been discussed very often by others besides Guibert himself (followers
of Folard, Pirch, Mesnil-Durand).

10 In the sense in which this term was used after 1759.
II The movement that brought the rifle into widespread use may be

roughly dated from the battle of Stein kirk, 1699.
12 On this importance of geometry, see J. de Beausobre: ‘The science of

war is essentially geometricaL .. The arrangement of a battalion and
a squadron on a whole front and at so much height is alone the effect
of an as yet unknown, but profound geometry’ (Beausobre, 307).

13 Journal pour l’instruction elimentaire, April 1816. Cf. Tronchot, who
has calculated that pupils must have been given over 200 commands a
day (without counting exceptional orders); for the morning alone
twenty-six commands communicated by the voice, twenty-three by
signs, thirty-seven by rings of the bell, and twenty-four by whistle,
which means a blow on the whistle or a ring on the bell every three
minutes.

2 The means of correct training

1 Reglement pour l’infanterie prussienne, Fr. trans., Arsenal, MS. 4067, fo.
144. For older plans see Praissac, 27-8 and Montgommery, 77. For the
new plans, cf. Beneton de Morange, Histoire de la guerre, 1741,61-4
and Dissertations sur Its Tenus; cf. also the many regulations such as
the Instruction sur Ie service des reglements de Cava/erie dans its camps,
29 June 1753·

2 Arch. nat. MM 666-9. Jeremy Bentham recounts that it was while
visiting the Ecole MiIitaire that his brother first had the idea of the
Panopticon.

3 Demia, 27-9. One might note a phenomenon of the same kind in the
organization of schools; for a long time ‘prefects’ were, independently
of the teachers, entrusted with the. moral responsibility for small groups
of pupils. After 1762, above all, one sees the appearance of a new
type of supervision, which was more administrative and more inte­
grated into the hierarchy; supervisors, mattres de quartier, mattres
subalternes. Cf. Dupont-Ferrier, 254 and 476.

3 Panopticism

I Archives militaires de Vincennes, A 1,516 sc. Piece. This regula­
don is broadly similar to a whole series others that date from the
same period and earlier.

316

Notes

2 In the Postscript to the Panopticon, 1791, Bentham adds dark inspec­
tion galleries painted in black around the inspector’s lodge, each
making it possible to observe two storeys of cells.

3 In his first version of the Panopticon, Bentham had also imagined an
acoustic surveillance, operated by means of pipes leading from the
cells to the central tower. In the Postscript he abandoned the idea,
perhaps because he could not introduce into it the principle of dis­
symmetry and prevent the prisoners from hearing the inspector as well
as the inspector hearing them. Julius tried to develop a system of dis­
symmetrical listening (Julius, 18).

4 Imagining this continuous flow of visitors entering the central tower
by an underground passage and then observing the circular landscape
of the Panopticon, was Bentham aware of the Panoramas that Barker
was constructing at exactly the same period (the first seems to have
dated from 1787) and in which the visitors, occupying the central
place, saw unfolding around them a landscape, a city or a battle. The
visitors occupied exactly the place of the sovereign gaze.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, it was often suggested
that the army should be used for the surveillance and general partition­
ing of the population. The army, as yet to undergo discipline in the
seventeenth century, was regarded as a force capable of instilling it.
Cf., for example, Servan, Le So.ldat citoyen, 178o.

6 Arsenal, MS. 2565. Under this number, one also finds regulations for
charity associations of the seveflteenth and eighteenth centuries.

7 Le Maire j:n a memorandum written at the request of Sartine, in
answer to sixteen questions posed by Joseph II on the Parisian police.
This memorandum was published by Gazier in 1879:

PART FOUR PRISON

I Complete and austere institutions

I The play between the two ‘natures’ of the prison still continues. A few
days ago [summer 19741 the head of state recalled the ‘principle’ that
detention ought to be no more than a ‘deprivation of liberty’ – the pure
essence of imprisonment, freed of the reality of prison; and added that
the prison could be justified only by its ‘corrective’ or rehabilitating
effects.

2 Treilhard, 8-9. The same theme is often to be found in the years
immediately prior to this: ‘The penalty of detention pronounced by
the law has above all the object of correcting individuals, that is to say,
of making them better, of preparing them by trials of shorter or longer

317

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• f010-027
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