Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault_summary

Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault

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Page: 43 Author: boulettem Subject: Line Date: 2013-09-29 19:58:04-06



































































































































































































































































Type: Note

Page: 221 Author: boulettem Subject: Note Date: 2013-09-29 21:26:19-06

"Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic

processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the

immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter; relations of

power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a

directly productive role, wherever they come into play" (HoS 94)


Panoptic systems decompress the energetic contact of crowds. A mechanical dissociation of the "

see/being seen dyad" (202) distributes the crowd's milling, brushing, merging collectivity into a "collection

of separated individualities" (201). It is maybe somewhat confounding, then, that flânerie takes its

characteristic pleasures in combining what appear to be two incompatible desires: the flâneur wants at

once to glide through the crowd and to subtract himself from it. He wants to see without being seen, but

this need for visual distance coexists with a need to roam through urban space and hence to de-segment

that space.

The flâneur takes pleasure not only in scoping out the crowd, but also in slipping his body in amongst it

and through it. He thus acts as a sort of mobile panoptic machine, deconsolidating the "see/being seen

dyad" with every step. Yet, in that very motion, flânerie eludes the temporal, spatial, informatic, and

productive conditions that a disciplinary program would seek to impose. He drifts through the urban crowds

as a form of leisure time, or an erotic compulsion, or to fetishize class difference. His aimless strolling

depends on class privilege even as it exposes the body of the flâneur to the permeability of class identity

(through masquerade / heterosocial space).


Bentham diagrammed the panopticon as "a pure architectural and optical system." It is, in the most literal

sense, a prison building. It is set up so that overseers can make use of maximal and optimal angles of

view on those confined in the prison. Prisoners never know when an overseer occupies the tower. The

panopticon enables power to exert itself on the prisoners by remaining "visible but unverifiable" (201).

But who lives this way? One might think that only those actually housed in such a structure would be

subject to the power effects it entails. Yet, Foucault insists, this diagram has a broader application. The

prison building represents only one form of a "political technology that may and must be detached from

any specific use" (205).

In fact, there really is no panopticon; there is only "the panoptic schema" used to to impose "a task or a

particular form of behaviour" on "a mutliplicity of individuals" (205). The panoptic schema is a "function"

that may be applied to any institution. It is a "generalizable model of functioning" (205).


as if the panoptic schema were a contagion...


Frances Ferguson explains the shortcomings of "the liberal assertion of the fundamental equality of

persons" in relation to the political task of altering the perceptibility of value for disenfranchised groups (38).

The liberal theory of equality is too abstract. It would "seem to see its work as complete at the outset when

it affirms the priority of virtually universal human faculties over particular circumstances." Egalitarian

regimes provide what Foucault calls "formal, juridical liberties" (222). But juridical equality cannot undo the

asymmetries of particular circumstances because it ignores the "systems of micro-power" immanent to

those circumstances. Foucault argues that disciplinary techniques in fact make the abstractions of liberal

thought possible in the sense that they provide "a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies" (222).

In liberal thought, "the notion of value is treated in terms of potentiality in and of itself, so that it provides no

counterweight at all to the images of past experience" (39).

Artificial environments make value perceptible in a different way. The panoptic schema makes these

environments function by grafting "corporal disciplines" into them.


Terror sermons contract the time of utterance around their hearers in order to contract down to a virtual

moment of death. Hearers can die at any moment, struck down by the sight of truth that the sermon

commands.

The printed sermon tortures its readers with the "awful spectacle" of this contracting toward death. The

outcry of the congregation, like the cry of pain that breaks forth from the condemned body, crowns the

ceremonial force of terrorizing speech.

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Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault_summary