Anne and I met for Foucault yesterday afternoon and worked our way through the Panopticism section in Discipline and Punish. Once again, for me Foucault provided an evocative phrase describing panopticism, and in turn, disciplinary operations, as a “cruel, ingenious cage” (p. 205). I can’t believe I didn’t notice these beautiful turns of phrase on my first reading. But as Anne commented yesterday, it really is a book that requires reading more than once. Because of Foucault’s writing style which is episodic, intuitive yet intensely empirical, it is difficult to read the book like a formal argument where the thesis is clearly and completely stated up front and then supported with evidence in a descriptive, narrative way. Rather, the thesis evolves through his engagement with the historical evidence. He states and restates, refining and adding more detail to his argument as he goes through. He investigates and maps…modelling a style of critical thinking and engagement – with the world as it was and as it is now.

The introductory example of the plague towns and the procedures that were carried out to prevent infection was one I hadn’t remembered. Foucault uses this as a prologue to his central example of Bentham’s Panopticon. Apart from being interesting, the plague is a useful example for emphasising what he describes as the disorder and confusion which must be present for disciplinary procedures to be successful.

But I guess the most interesting is the Panopticon, Bentham’s design for a new type of prison where:

“at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open on to the inner side of the ring; the peripheric 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 outside, 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… the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many small cages, so many small theatres in which actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible…Visibility is a trap.” (p. 200)

So clearly, this is a model of surveillance, but as Foucault points out what makes this disciplinary power even more effective and insidious is that it is quickly internalised. That is, it doesn’t matter if there is a supervisor or not, it is the thought that there might be that works to induce certain behaviours. Power is “visible and unverifiable” (p. 201).

And what Foucault goes on to say is that this kind of disciplinary power operation is not restricted to Bentham’s prison, it is “a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” (p. 205). Foucault then spends the second half of the chapter going into great detail, tracing this social transformation and drawing back on the examples he has already introduced throughout the book to this point: the military, the hospital, the school. And he sums it up very nicely in his final question: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (p. 228).

Anne saw great possibilities for her own research in terms of the internalisation of surveillance with Syrian/ Lebanese immigrants and found the sections where Foucault wrote specifically about the police and power particularly interesting. We also discussed his use of the word “technology” which can be confusing as we usually employ the term to refer to a specific tool or implement, but Foucault uses technology to refer also to the principle of power that can be abstracted from specific tools or cultural sites. We also discussed the proliferation of surveillance in our daily lives…from cctv, to quality assurance and performance evaluations in the workplace.

Next week “Complete and austere institutions”.