Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, analyzes a novel kind of disciplinary power that was implemented in the 17th century to combat the plague, a new threat that was lethal, invisible, and highly contagious. The innovative approach not only isolated a town or village in which an outbreak had occurred, it also brought a group of people under intense scrutiny and segmentation, confining residents to their homes, placing sentinels at the corners of streets and intersections, and requiring regular review and registration of the position, condition, and identity of each individual under quarantine. For Foucault the model of the quarantine was a new “technology of power” that he called “discipline.”
A “mechanism of discipline” can be thought of as any “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 uninterrupted links exist between the center and periphery.” The “architectural figure” of this disciplinary power is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a model prison built upon a simple concept with echoing and accelerating implications: a tower surrounded by a ring of cells. A sentinel stands in the central tower; the guard can observe each of the prisoners, but they can neither see the sentry nor one another; prisoners never know when or how they are being observed, but recognize at all times their own visibility and vulnerability: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and
A “mechanism of discipline” can be thought of as any “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 uninterrupted links exist between the center and periphery.” The “architectural figure” of this disciplinary power is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a model prison built upon a simple concept with echoing and accelerating implications: a tower surrounded by a ring of cells. A sentinel stands in the central tower; the guard can observe each of the prisoners, but they can neither see the sentry nor one another; prisoners never know when or how they are being observed, but recognize at all times their own visibility and vulnerability: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and