Discipline and Punish
Author
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), French philosopher and historian of systems of thought, professor at the Collège de France from 1970.
Publication Details
Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. English translation by Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977. 333 pp.
The French title is closer to "to watch over and punish," and the loss of surveiller in translation costs something: the book is about surveillance before it is about discipline.
Description
The book opens with two documents placed side by side. The first is the 1757 execution of Robert-François Damiens, described over several pages in unbearable detail — torn with pincers, burned, drawn by horses. The second is a timetable for a Paris reformatory drawn up eighty years later, specifying the hour of rising, the length of work, the minutes allowed for meals.
Foucault's question is what happened in between. The conventional answer is humanitarian progress. His is that a technology of power was replaced by a more efficient one: punishment moved from the body to the soul, from spectacle to routine, from the sovereign's vengeance to the institution's correction — and became vastly more thorough in the process.
Key Ideas
- Discipline. Not a set of rules but a technique: the distribution of bodies in space (enclosure, partitioning, ranking), the control of activity through timetables and prescribed gestures, the organisation of training into graduated stages, and the composition of individuals into an efficient whole.
- Docile bodies. The product. A body that "may be subjected, used, transformed and improved" — and, crucially, made more capable at the same time as it is made more obedient. Foucault's insistence that discipline increases both utility and docility together is what distinguishes his account from a straightforward theory of repression.
- Hierarchical observation, normalising judgement, the examination. The three instruments. The examination combines the first two and produces the individual as a documented case — the file, the record, the dossier. This is where the book connects most directly to contemporary data systems.
- Panopticism. Bentham's design read as a diagram of power that can be detached from the prison and applied anywhere: visibility as a trap, power made automatic and disindividualised, the inmate becoming "the principle of his own subjection." "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"
- Power/knowledge. The claim that runs through the book: power does not merely repress knowledge but produces it. The disciplinary institutions generated the human sciences — criminology, psychiatry, pedagogy — and those sciences supplied the categories the institutions then applied.
- The carceral archipelago. Discipline is not confined to the prison; it spreads across a continuum of institutions until the distinction between confinement and ordinary life becomes a matter of degree.
Criticism
Historians have contested the periodisation and the evidentiary base, arguing that Foucault generalises from selected sources and understates continuities. Others object that a theory in which power is everywhere and produces its own subjects leaves no clear ground for resistance. Foucault's later work on governmentality and on the care of the self responds to some of this.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This is the book that made surveillance a subject rather than a technique, and it supplies the analytic frame that almost all subsequent work either extends or argues against — including Deleuze's societies of control, which claims the disciplinary enclosures are being superseded. The section on the examination and the file is the most directly applicable part today: Foucault describes the constitution of a person as a documented case a century and a half before that became the ordinary condition of anyone with an account. See algorithmic identity.
