The Historicity of Discipline and the
Politics of Institutionalization: A Reading of Foucault’s “Panopticism”
Foucault divulges the
essentiality of history in conceiving discipline in modern age. The origin of
disciplinary mechanisms was traced to the plague in the seventeenth century in Europe.
Foucault traces the origin of discipline as a custom to prevent the plague from
engulfing the land further. This custom that he locates precisely in the
seventeenth century is the point of origin of discipline in modern times. Separation
and compartmentalization were practiced in order to curtail the spreading of
the sickness. Such a configuration gradually spread into the treatment of
lepers as well, in which they were kept aloof from the rest of the society. Such
a system presupposed the identities of those who ‘deserve’ such segregation
from the mainstream. Corollary to this attempt is the self-prominent status of
the rest of the society as a just, clean, healthy, and normal group of people. Not
surprisingly, such is the pattern one may observe in today’s prison systems
too.
In
Discipline and Punish, Foucault
juxtaposes discipline with punishment. The individual involved in subverting
discipline is met with punishment, which when read historically, involves
severe brutality and violence. Punishment is often inflicted upon the body, in
a public spectacle. “In the past a manifestation of the strongest power over
the body the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode
into its truth” (227). Foucault bridges the modern mechanisms of discipline with
it history. All modern systems of discipline follow this historical enactment
that separated and quarantined the plague victims in seventeenth century
Europe.
Foucault
argues that discipline was a judicio-political defence against the debilitating
impact of the epidemic. When bio-medical mechanisms failed to create their
desired impact, the society resorted to judicio-political force to thwart the
spread of the disease. Brute force replaced medicinal interventions. Foucault
suggests that present-day disciplinary institutions are derived from this
notion of supplying brute force to control masses. However this act of control
is performed through deploying the strategies enacted in the historical
structure called Panopticon. An 18th century English philosopher and
social theorist, Jeremy Bentham is credited with the conception of Panopticon. Along
with his brother, a mechanical engineer named Samuel Bentham it is believed,
Jeremy Bentham conceived the scheme for this disciplinary mechanism. Panopticon
is a structure with a tower at its centre. The peripheral cells are arranged in
relation to the tower as to offer unhindered view for the observer who dwells
on the top chamber in the tower. This structure enables constant observation of
the inmates of the cells that surrounds the tower. The cells are constructed in
such a fashion that the inmates are prevented from establishing any
communication with the member in other cells. However, the observer in the
tower gets constant access to the vision of the permanent presence of the
inmates. In this arrangement, discipline is maintained through unending
observation, through never giving away the movement of the observer to the
inmates, thus creating a fear for the presence of the observer. This scheme requires
just one observer to discipline an impressive number of people.
Foucault
argument that modern disciplinary mechanisms are an extension of the panopticon
explains the significance he attaches with the act of observation. Surveillance
breeds discipline in modern societies. Disciplinary institutions make use of
the scheme of panopticon, by employing constant surveillance. This system is an
improvement over the “discipline blockade” that was prevalent during the plague
days, in which a group of individuals are enclosed on the edge of the
mainstream. The new “discipline mechanism” helped power operate with higher
efficiency. The central argument in panopticon structure is on visibility. “The
panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms
of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into
men’s behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new
objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised”
(Foucault 204). In the disciplinary society, thus, both productivity and
consumption are governed by visibility. The panopticon stands as the historical
evidence of the danger in being visible. For power, on the contrary, visibility
of its large number of subjects offers order and control. Surveillance, could
thus be argued as the tool with which power attempts to capitalize on its own expansion.
“Surveillance also attempts to make
those spaces more predictable for the watchers. By altering the balance of
powers and disabilities, exposure changes the parameters that shape the ongoing
performance of identity, community and place” (Cohen 194).
Foucault
associates the image of the panopticon with a “dream building”. Panopticon “is
the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; ... must be represented as a pure architectural
and optical system... a figure of political technology that must be detached
from any specific use” (205). Foucault extends the use of panopticon to various
areas of social activity, stressing its “polyvalent” applications. The
panopticon applies its scheme in arraying the individuals within a pattern that
is ‘observable’ to the centre of power. In other words, visibility becomes the
tool in the hands of power. But this is achieved through the specific pattern
of alignment that is achieved through “a type of location of bodies in space”
(205). The extended application of panopticon in disciplinary systems could be
identified panopticism. “It can reduce the number of those who exercise it,
while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised.” (206). This
feature makes the structure of the panopticon a particularly apt mechanism for
the exercise of power in modern societies. Panopticism rules out the
possibility for the existence of a prince. The physical presence of the ruling
figure could be infinitely postponed through the several chains of authorities
involved in the practise of discipline as well as the execution of punishment.
Unlike
in the medieval period, punishment is no longer direct and physical. Punishment
has taken the form of discipline and has more psychological significance. Hospitals,
police, and the educational system participate in the act of installing
discipline within the subjects of a society. Although disciplinary mechanisms
of modern times approach the notions of discipline and punishment in ways
different than the medieval pattern, the historical origin of the concurrent
mechanism cannot be ruled out. Foucault identifies three “profound processes”
in the extension of the disciplinary institutions in later years.
1. Functional
inversion of the disciplines: “Disciplines function increasingly as techniques
for making useful individuals” (211). Discipline adheres itself to most of the
governing modes of production, “transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of
aptitudes and skills, the war-machine” (211). In other words, the guaranteed output
of the disciplines has become enhancing units for power structures in the form
of individuals. The subject himself could be taken into trust, educated, and
cultured through the disciplines, as the person who occupies the chair of the
observer, a functional unit that preserves, disseminates, and locates
discipline.
2. The
swarming of disciplinary mechanisms: Within a free state, the disciplinary
mechanism of importance may not always be a centralized governing or surveying
other. It could also be the very elementary notion upon which the society may
have been constructed. The conditioning mechanism could be identified here as
the crucial element in locating discipline outside of the conventional
structures. Rather than physical structures of observation, like a tower at the
centre of the panopticon or a CCTV camera in a modern library or hospital, it
could also be programmed into the psyche of the individual taking part in
social activities. In a theocentric world, this self-surveillance manifests as
guilt. Foucault’s notion of “swarming of disciplinary mechanisms” indicates his
foregrounding such structures as hospitals, schools, etc. Healthcare
institutions as well as charity organisations “keep the authorities informed”
in the outbreak of any contagious disease so as to prevent the scheme of
discipline from malfunctioning. However, this state of structural intervention
into the act of social observation is effectively surpassed by “the spread of
disciplinary procedures, not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as
centres of observation disseminated throughout society” (212). Foucault
positions his argument against social resistance too. In a society functions in
the parameters of formless observation and self-patrolling, resistance could
only strengthen the significance of the power structure that manifests its
spirit in multiple locations in the form of constant observation.
3. The
state-control of the mechanisms of discipline: The invisibility of the observer
in contemporary society and the full presence of observation trigger the
imposing symmetry of a disciplinary society. State-control of discipline
mechanism underscores the potential of this system. “All the radiations of
force and information that spread from the circumference culminate from the
magistrate general” (Foucault 213). Foucault mentions that the significance of
the police is as “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 details it is concerned with” (213). The notion of policing in the eighteenth
century has also the power and intention to discipline. This historic
configuration is transmitted into the present day police systems “as the
auxiliary of justice in the pursuit of criminals and as an instrument for the
political supervision of plots, opposition movements or revolts” (215).
Foucault
conceives discipline as neither an institution nor an apparatus. Discipline has
disseminated into the general society from its earlier status as a “quarantine”
to a more “indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’” (216).
Panopticism is “indefinitely generalizable”. “Not because the disciplinary
modality of power has replaced all the others, but because it has infiltrated
the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as intermediary between
them” (216). This scenario has a subtlety that was nonexistence in the schemes
of power in antiquity. Foucault notes that “[a]ntiquity has been a civilization
of spectacle” (216). The individual agency that he ascribes to power replaces
the spectacle and reaches down to the psychological level of the subject to
assert the normative codes of social life. These norms perform as psychological
surveillance mechanisms.
In
the context of panopticism practised and promulgated on a subjective level,
Foucault’s notion that “the spectacular manifestations of power, were
extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a
panopticism” (217) could be seen as an argument in favour of the historicity of
discipline. Foucault traces the origin of discipline to underscore the presence
of disciplinary society. Within a disciplinary society, the monarch is not
essential. Figures of supreme authority are done away with subjective and
capillary interaction in asserting power through constant surveillance.
Another
argument in favour of the historicity of the disciplinary society is the way in
which Foucault traces the processes that gave birth to a disciplinary society. He
hints at three broad historical processes that are involved in the formation of
disciplinary society. These broad processes could be grouped under “economics,
juridicopolitical, and lastly, scientific” (218).
Disciplines
impose a strategy that defines “a tactics of power” based on three criteria. First
tactics employed by the disciplinary society to assert the scheme of power is
to “obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost” (218). Maximising
the intensity of this power and extending it is another strategy. This second
attempt repudiates any interval in the process or failure. “Thirdly, to link
this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses within which
it is exercised” (218). Growth and thrust in demographic and the increase in
the apparatuses of production are the two economic reasons that substantiate
the dissemination of power in the third category. Foucault suggests that
“instead of proceeding by deduction,” disciplines “are integrated into the
productive efficiency of the apparatus from within, into the growth of this
efficiency and into the use of the what it produces” (219).
In
the judiciopolitical spectrum, discipline acts as an “infra law”. The
subjective nature of subtle and under the surface self-surveillance offers a new
pattern in judicial system. Instead of incriminating the perpetrator of a crime
or locating the dissident, this re-imagined disciplinary mechanism based on
panopticism does not permit the crime to take place. This is achieved through
constant surveillance. The prisons have become correction facilities, thus the
“codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe” (224).
Foucault
underscores that a refinement of power relations have given rise to what may
identified as ‘epistemological thaw’. This could be substantiated as “a
multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation
of new forms of knowledge” (224). Inquisition used in jurisdiction and sciences
has become replaced by indefinite observation. In order to manifest this configuration
the power utilizes interviews, interrogations, and consultations. These are
inextricable patterns observed in modern educational and professional
landscape. Foucault, thus, attests the political undertones of
institutionalization, and manifestation of power. Every disciplinary society handles
down to the makers of its codes and conducts subliminal instructions as to inculcate
functional algorithmic patterns to condition the individual subjects.
Works Cited
Cohen, Julie E. “Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, and
Exposure” 75.1 (2008) n.pag. Web. 31
August 2015. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20141904>
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. London:
Penguin Books, 1991. Print.
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