The Power of Politics and the Panopticon

Foucault reads this change in structure as a change in the way power manifests itself politically. But although the body no longer comes under physical torture, it remains the vessel commandeered by power. He writes “that punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present” (30). He refers to prison revolts that take place in new and accommodating prisons just as frequently as in old and outmoded prisons. Foucault found that a prison offering medical and educational services was no less vulnerable to revolt than any other prison. Less physical misery did not lead to more contentment. Foucault sees that these revolts as evidence of the surviving influence of power over the body.

"In fact, they were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power; it is this whole technology of power over the body that the technology of the ‘soul’…fails either to conceal or to compensate, for the simple reason that it is one of its tools" (30).

Hence Foucault sees the prison itself as the visible instrument of a political power over the body. Nowhere else does this appear more clearly than in Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon.

Foucault points to Bentham’s panopticon as the best illustration of power’s systematic manifestation. An image of efficiency and control, the prison stands out as an ideal realization of power upon the body. The design features a central guard tower that looks to the cells, which are spread out around the tower in a circle. The prisoners are isolated in as much as is possible allowing the guards to monitor each prisoner individually. Because of the structure the guard can see into every cell yet the prisoners never know when they are being watched. They cannot see the guard, if one is even present.

"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary" (201).

The very design of the building exerts power over the prisoner while simultaneously standing as an analogy to the political power of a society.



Just as the prisoners within the panopticon develop paranoia within the context of the architecture, so too are the subjects of power controlled by the systems in place above their heads. Foucault presents the panopticon as an image of the way power works in the new politico-judicial system he describes. The panopticon “must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (205). In a setup where the power must be exerted over the body but where the public spectacle and torture are no longer used then the entire judicial system presiding over the subjects becomes a major arena, like sexuality, through which power can operate. What is interesting about this operation is that it removes the need for physical contact with the body while remaining an instrument of power over the body. Like the discussion above of sexual discourse as a manipulation of power via the will to knowledge, so too does the disciplinary procedure move according to the will to knowledge for the benefit of power. Foucault readily admits that this analysis of power is very much a political one, stating that he intends to “regard punishment as a political tactic” and to “make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man” (23). The link to politics comes through the panopticon; it stands as both an actual and hypothetical diagram of power’s operation within a society.

"The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building; it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use" (205).

Just as was discovered within the discussion on sexuality, “a specific mode of subjection [the politically imposed penal system] was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific status’” (24). Power then certainly exhibits a sort of control over the body but perhaps in a much more subtle and complex way than generally believed. Power like that of the panopticon controls the body but it wants the soul: Foucault quotes Mably as writing that “punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul” (326). Two films about prison life that illuminate Discipline and Punish will be in the following chapter.