UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE

SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957

HE WHO IS SUBJECT TO A FIELD OF VISIBILITY, AND WHO KNOWS IT,

ASSUMES RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONSTRAINTS OF POWER ; HE
MAKES THEM PLAY SPONTANEOUSLY UPON HIMSELF; HE INSCRIBES IN
HIMSELF THE POWER RELATION IN WHICH HE SIMULTANEOUSLY
PLAYS BOTH ROLES ; HE BECOMES THE PRINCIPLE OF HIS OWN
SUBJECTION (FOUCAULT). DISCUSS IN TERMS OF FOUCAULTS
UNDERSTANDING OF DISCIPLINE.

Michel Foucault roots his understanding of power in two systems: firstly discipline in
his 1975 publication Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; secondly in Bio-politics, a
concept he introduces in his 1976 publication The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to
Knowledge.
My essay will discuss the system of discipline. Foucault understands discipline to be
methods that allow meticulous control over the operations of the bodyand imposed
upon them a relation of docility-utility (Foucault, 1991: 137). The quotation in
question describes the result of the most complete form of discipline in Foucaults
opinion: Panopticism. Derived from Jeremy Benthams Panopticon design for a
prison where all prisoners are in a constant state of unilateral observation from a watch
tower, Panopticism is the effect the structure has on each prisoner; their behavior
becomes self-correcting because the they know they are in a constant field of visibility,
but they never know exactly when they are being watched. Therefore, each prisoner must
act as if they are always being observed i.e. he becomes the principle of his own
subjection. However, before I explain the Panopticon and Panopticism, I must present
Foucaults understanding of discipline and how it is carried out upon the body first. I will
use Docile Bodies, the first chapter of Part III: Discipline of Discipline and Punish, to
assert that Foucaults understanding of discipline, and therefore the functioning of the
Panopticon, manifests itself as a tetrad, controlling Space, Activity, Time, and
Component Forces, allowing those in power to achieve docility-utility over a body.

Docile Bodies starts by juxtaposing two soldiers of different chronological

disposition. Foucault describes the seventeenth-century soldier as being: someone
who could be recognized from afarhis body was the blazon of his strength and valour
(Foucault, 135). The second part of his comparison describes the late eighteenth-century
soldier: the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless claythe
machine that can be constructed. Where the former describes solely the physicality of
the soldier, the latter describes the composition of the soldier as a non-individual subject;

1
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
the soldier is seen to be an abstract creation of power-relations, whose attributes can be
applied to any body. Foucault asserts that control over the body has run throughout
history, where making a body docile allowed it to be subjected to use and improvement:
The classical age saw the discovery of the body as an object and target of powerthe
body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and
increases its forces (Foucault, 136). The eighteenth century saw that docility could be
implemented to all kinds of institutions to control society in general, in schools,
hospitals, prisons, but also that utility of the body was just as important in the concept
of discipline. Foucault explains that the core to this new level of control was expressed in
the meticulous control of the operations of the body (Foucault, 137), with three
methods, which he calls discipline. Firstly, the scale of control: it was a question not of
treating the body, en masseas if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it retail,
individuallyat the level of the mechanism itself (Foucault, 137). Then, the object of
control: the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization
(Foucault, 137). Finally, the modality: it implies uninterrupted, constant
coercionexercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time,
space, movement (Foucault, 137). These three methods or bind together and instill the
relation of docility-utility (Foucault, 137) into the body, which is the key concept I will
bring forward in describing why discipline manifests itself as a tetrad to Foucault.

Foucault argues that if the aim of discipline is to instill in the subjected body this
docility-utility relation, then it does so in four areas: Space, Activity, Time,
Component forces.
Space: - Firstly, disciplining a body requires the meticulous control of Space,
which itself is managed in four ways:
1. Enclosure
2. Partitioning
3. Functional sites
4. Rank
Firstly, enclosure: Disciplinerequires enclosurea place heterogeneous to all others and
closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony (Foucault, 141).
An exclusive space must be set aside for the repetitive exercise of discipline on the body.
Institutions had always used enclosure to exert discipline upon the subjects, hence the
existence of specific locations such as schools, hospitals, barracks and factories; however

2
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
Foucault claims that enclosure alone is not sufficient in disciplinary machinery
(Foucault, 143).
Therefore the second part of using space in discipline is partitioning: Each individual has
his own place; and each place its individualDisciplinary space tends to be divided into
as many sections as there are bodies (Foucault, 143). This is true of many disciplinary
institutions today. In schools, one often has their own specific seat within the classroom;
a hospital assigns beds to individuals; a soldier occupies a specific space in formation; the
worker has his own particular workstation.
Thirdly, even when each body is in its own specific partition, the partition must be a
useful space, which Foucault calls functional sites. Foucault takes particular interest in the
application of functional sites in the naval hospital in Rochefort, France: [the hospital]
tended to individualise bodies, diseases, symptoms, lives and deathsa real table of
juxtaposed and carefully distinct singularities. Out of discipline, a medically useful space
was born (Foucault, 144).
Finally, there needs to be classification or rank. Here this means that there is subdivision
within subdivision. Schools are, and nearly always have been, divided into years based
on age; each year is then usually divided according to abilities and proficiencies in
subjects, with top, middle, and bottom classes/sets; within each, the teacher, through the
process of tests and examination, will rank the individual students in their class. Schools
are a system of meticulous and rational ranking of students ability, just as hospitals rank
and tabulate illness or disease; factories a point of manufacture/production; barracks for
army tactics.
Activity: - The control of activity is the second way in which discipline instills
docility-utility in a body. Foucault splits the theme of Activity into five main points.
First is the timetable, an old and established tool in controlling body movements and
activities. Foucault asserts it is a monastic concept, which seeks to establish rhythms,
impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of the repetition (Foucault, 149).
Success of the timetable as a model for controlling activity lies in its long-term ubiquity
in disciplinary institutions: It soon spreadto be found in schools, workshops, and
hospitals (Foucault, 149). Furthermore, Foucault emphasises how time within these
timetables was becoming increasingly divided: One began to count in quarter hours,
minutes, seconds (Foucault, 150).
Second in controlling activity is what Foucault deems the temporal elaboration of the act
(Foucault, 150). He contrasts the abrupt seventeenth-century description of how a

3
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
soldier should march with that of an elaborate and meticulous eighteenth-century
description, which he concludes is not a timetable as such, but a collective and
obligatory rhythm, imposed from the outsideit assures the elaboration of the act itself
(Foucault 151-152). Each instruction given to the body is broken down into its
constituent parts; each part has its own position and specific timing. In doing so the
body is disciplined Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of
power (Foucault, 152).
Third is the correlation of the body and the gesture (Foucault, 152). Foucault says that
discipline does not exist in the teaching of an individual action or a gesture, but rather
when all components of the body are brought together in unison to create the
action/gesture: it imposes the best relation between the gesture and the overall position
of the body, which is its condition of efficiency and speed (Foucault, 152). The end
result is maximum efficiency and use of the body: A disciplined body is the prerequisite
of an efficient gesture (Foucault, 152).
Fourth in controlling the activity is body-object articulation. Foucault quotes another
detailed account from an eighteenth-century French army ordinance, constituting the
meticulous instructions for firing a gun. It commands positions for the knee, the eye, the
arm, the hand, and the finger, all relative to positions on the gun: hammer, barrel, screw,
notch (Ordonnance du 1er Janvier 1776, cited by Foucault, 153). He deems this the
instrumental coding of the body (Foucault, 153), as if the body is itself a machine that
can be coded in sync with another machine, in this case a gun. This body-tool
complex (Foucault, 153) is the result of power, which simultaneously constructs and
regulates the operation of the tool.
Finally, Foucault says these meticulous controls must result in Exhaustive use of the
body. Traditional applications of the timetable had negative principles for the body of
non-idleness; it was forbidden to waste timea moral offence and economic
dishonesty (Foucault, 154). Foucault claims that discipline changed the principle of the
timetable to a positive one of a theoretically ever-growing use of time; exhaustion rather
than use (Foucault, 154). Exhaustive use provides a positive economyit is a
question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment,
ever more useful forces (Foucault, 154). Discipline allowed and maintained the most
efficient use of the time, where activities would be carried out at maximum speed and
with minimal inconveniences.

4
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
Time: - the third theme in Foucaults discipline-tetrad, which he head under The
organization of geneses. Foucault explains that progression through the eighteenth century
meant there were variances in how time was arranged, and this meant that discipline was
a device that could measure and capitalise time, in four main ways.
Foucault says that if time is to be implemented in a disciplinary sense, one must Divide
duration into successive or parallel elements, each of which must end at a specific time
(Foucault, 157). Secondly, these threads must relate to a plan, with each stage subtly
increasing in complexity: Organise these threads according to an analytical plan
successions of elements as simple as possible, combining according to increasing
complexity (Foucault, 158). Thirdly, these threads of increasing in complexity should be
consummated by a form of test or examination for Foucault writes that this has a three-
fold effect: showing whether a subject has reached the level required, of guaranteeing
that each subject undergoes the same apprenticeship and of differentiating the abilities of
the individual (Foucault, 158). Finally, divide the series and subdivide again and again:
Draw up series of series; lay down for each individual, according to his seniority, his
rank, the exercises that are suited to him.
Foucault concludes that the linear seriation of activities with specific times meant that
detailed control and a regular interventionin each moment in time (Foucault, 160)
was now possible, and that this seriation is centered upon exercise Exercise is that
technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different,
but always graduated (Foucault, 161). Foucault asserts that exercise in the ascetic life of
the military and religion were tasks of increasing complexity that marked the gradual
acquisition of knowledge and good behavior (Foucault, 161) i.e., exercise is a method
that makes us behave and also useful; it instills docility-utility.
Component forces: - Fourth in his understanding of discipline, Foucault asserts
with reference to Karl Marxs Capital, that component forces create an efficient machine
and that the resultant productivity/power is greater that the sum of its individual
component parts: the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated
workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part
simultaneously in oneoperation (Marx, Capital, vol. I, 308; cited from Foucault, 164).
Foucault splits Component Forces into three parts.
Firstly, Foucault asserts that each individual body is a cog that is inserted into a
machine, like a soldier within a regiment: an insertion of this body-segment in a
whole ensemble (Foucault, 164).

5
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
Secondly, each specific time, Foucault affirms that to acquire the maximum quantity of
forces and obtain the optimum outcome, the time of the individual bodies must be
adjusted in relation to the others (Foucault, 165). Foucault explains the seventeenth-
century concept of mutual improvement schools: the oldest pupils were entrusted with
tasks involving simple supervision, then of checking work, then of teaching; in the end
all of the pupils all of the time was occupiedThe school became a machine for
learning (Foucault, 165). The end result was that all the pupils would be
learning/improving a great deal more than if there was one master doing all the teaching;
the productivity becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Thirdly, arrangement and timing of a machine become organized under a successful
command system: All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and
sustained my injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarityit must trigger off
the required behavior(Foucault, 166). For Foucault, a successful command is a
concise phrase or word that simultaneously defines the entire manoeuvre and
instantaneously initiates this manoeuvre in the component bodies.

After Foucault explains his abstract understanding of the four areas of discipline in
Docile Bodies, he then gives body to this hypothesis in the chapter Panopticism.
Panopticism derives from Jeremy Benthams eighteenth-century concept for a prison
the Panopticon which itself originates from the ancient Greek words pan all, and
optos to see (in Greek mythology there existed a hundred-eyed monster called
Panoptes). The Panopticon is an annular building of individual cells with each cells walls
running from inside the outside to the inside, so each individual cannot see into the cell
next to his. The building allows light to pass from the outside to a central watchtower in
which guards are posted; blinds and partitions mean these guards cannot be seen by
individuals within the cells, whilst the unilateral manipulation of the light means the
guards can see everything within each individual cell, what Foucault calls the
seeing/being seen dyad and this is the key point of interest, for each prisoner knows he
can always be seen, but never knows exactly when, which is both the essence and the
source of power in the Panopticon: Visibility is a trap (Foucault, 200). Therefore each
must act as if he is being watched all the time, and this means his behaviour becomes
self-correcting, or as Foucault puts it: he inscribes in himself the power relation in
which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own
subjection (Foucault, 202-203). Panopticism is the whole effect created by Benthams

6
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
mechanism, where behaviour becomes self-correcting due to the certain uncertainty of
being observed: Permanent in its effect, even if it is discontinuous in its action
(Foucault, 201). Foucault succinctly describes the Panopticons affect: it automatises
and disindividualises power (Foucault, 202). The power within the Panopticon cannot
be attributed to any authoritative individual because the power is the result of the
mechanism and its meticulous setting; Foucault says that it is so efficient that changing
the person in the central watchtower would not change anything: Any individual, taken
almost at random, can operate this machine (Foucault, 202). This is because the
mechanism itself in its arrangement of the cells, its lighting, its unilateral visibility and the
certain-uncertainty of being observed, creates the power over the individual inside, hence
it is disindividualised. Secondly, this power is inserted into the individual by the
mechanism and continuously kept inside them, thus automatising the power, so much
so that Foucault wrote: [the Panopticon]can reduce the number of those who
exercise [power], while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised
(Foucault, 206). One of the most fascinating things for Foucault about the Panopticon is
this inverse relationship between degree of power and those who exercise it; Benthams
Panopticon would work without anyone in the central watchtower: [power] tends to the
non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and
permanent are its effects (Foucault, 203).
For Foucault, Benthams Panopticon is the simultaneous optimisation of the discipline-
tetrad Space, Activity, Time, and Component Forces that I explained earlier: It is a
type of location of bodies in space, a distribution of individuals in relation to one
another, of hierarchical organisation (Foucault, 205). Foucault sees the shift from
physical exertion to mental exertion as a step into modernity for humans. Where power
used to be exerted publicly and physically on the body to exemplify wrongdoers and thus
control society, discipline, as we have seen in the functioning of the Panopticon, seeks to
exert automatised and disindividualised power over the individuals mind in order to
establish order and control in society. This is Panopticism for Foucault, a transferable
concept, not exclusive to the Panopticon, used by disciplinary institutions but more
importantly by the powers that be to control society: The Panopticonmust be
understood as a generalisable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in
terms of the everyday lives of men[the Panopticon] is the diagram of a mechanism of
power reduced to its ideal formit is in fact a figure of political technology that may be
attached from any specific use (Foucault, 205). Foucault claims it is polyvalent in its

7
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957
application (Foucault, 205), giving examples of hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, barracks
and places of work: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks,
hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (Foucault, 228). Foucault claims that modern
society sees the proverbial Panopticon personified in the Police, defined as The state-
control of the mechanisms of discipline (Foucault, 213). George Orwells 1984 and
Aldous Huxleys Brave New World describe and explore this concept with chilling
precision in predicting modern life; Big Brother really can be said to be always watching
in the twenty-first century! Foucault writes Police Power must bear over everything,
and that it achieves this in the dust of events, actions, behavior, opinions (Foucault,
213). In my opinion this is exactly the case for modern society, at least in civilized
societies. One only has to walk in any town or city to feel the automatised power at work
on ones self; the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of the police is like a mist that
hangs in the air that keeps the street in order and under control.

Word Count: 3070

8
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER JAMES JOYCE
SOCY60221: IDENTITY, POWER & MODERNITY ID: 9555957

Reference List
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline & Punish: The Birth Of The Prison. (A. Lane, Trans.) Penguin
Books.

Word Count including Reference List: 3088