On Foucault - Discipline and Punsih

To most this post will male little or no sense. These are my notes on reading parts of Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison by Michael Foucault. Random House, Toronto 1977.

Torture

Punishment - public punishment that reflected the crime. Ritualised marks of vengeance applied to the body of the criminal. Reflected and reinforced the power of the monarch and was often above the laws which it proposed to uphold - torture. The punitive city.

The spectacle - Full of symbolism as a way of instructing the public and reinforcing the relationship between crime and punishment.


Prisons as a regimen to ensure compliant, obedient behaviour aimed at reforming a person through their giving themselves to the system. Coercion, training of the body as a way of changing the mind. Prisons represent the the institutionalisation of the will to punish p. 130

Discipline

Usually requires an enclosure, a heterogeneous space. Army barracks, workshops, factories, monasteries

Each person has a space and each space a person. Establishes presences and absences and sets up control.

Spaces are defined for things and processes. Each space a thing and each thing a space.

Timetables and the control of activity

Work takes on religious airs. Time-tables used to establish rhythm and control in schools, workplaces.

The body controls the gesture and the object of articulation and therefore must be disciplined to achieve the optimum outcome.

Discipline draws up tables, prescribes movement, imposes exercises, and arranges tactics p. 167

The exercise of discipline necessarily involves a mechanism of observation by a form of hierarchy that, in the process of observing gives power to the observer and the means of coercion makes the observed observable. Organisations are set up to maximise the surveillance by the hierarchy of the governed in a manner that is least intrusive but that maximises the surveillance. Embedding of surveillance. The whole apparatus is set up to maximise observation whilst giving the illusion of freedom. eg the creation of openings and spaces which permitted freedom and surveillance. p. 173. The pyramid organisation set up to maximise surveillance and minimise disruption to organisation.

A structure of normalisation creates a way to measure individual differences and allows for standardisation and the development of specialists through the achievement of this 'normal' behaviour p. 184

Where power is anonymous and functional, those on whom it is exercised become more individuated. Power is exercised through surveillance and observation rather than ritual and commemoration, by the measurement against a norm. Individuation arises from the degree that a person differs from the norm. p. 193

The Panopticon

"Visibility is a trap" p. 200

A way of inducing a permanent sensation of being watched that generates the power of the watcher. The feeling that surveillance is continuous even if it isn't. The power is therefore visible but unverifiable. The person need not know they are being watched, just believe that is the case. Therefore, the watching does not need to be continuous.

The panopticon is a machinery that ensures disequilibrium.

Because the prisoner believes they are being constantly watched they become their own prison guard and therefore the mechanism of power and control and prison administration can be smaller and lighter.

The panopticon becomes a place where society can keep itself continually surveilled - the Internet. Each person can keep the other under watch. It works best when surveillance is light and unseen.

Panopticon as a metaphor for self?