Foucault begins this essay with a discussion of the separation measures taken against people with the plague, and he compares these with those of lepers. Both were separated from society as a result of fear, but plague victims were controlled by segmentation (groupings) and order and discipline and power structures, while lepers were merely separated (individualized). Foucault uses this history to set up how discipline and punishment function in modern society. Foucault focuses on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Plague measures were needed to protect society: the panopticon allows power to operate efficiently. The panopticon offers permanent visibility, ensuring homogeneous effects of power. Bentham believed that power should be visible and unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but he cannot communicate or see other prisoners, and he never knows whether he is being observed. Foucault points out that the panopticon is a machine for "dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen." He calls it a "laboratory of power"--a place where the machine can be used to carry out experiments using observation. The panopticon is a figure of political technology. I love this passage:
"The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, of making a function function through these power relations" (594-95).
The most fascinating part of the panopticon is this idea that it is a transparent building--"in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole." According to Foucault, our society has moved from one of spectacle to one of surveillance--we are in the panoptic machine. In our time, the state controls such methods of coercion and operates them throughout society. The development of a disciplinary society involves socio-economic factors, particularly population increase and economic development.
Foucault assumes that all citizens of modern society are entitled to make demands on the state. However, he also argues that the state cannot be separated or understood without the mechanisms that also control and examine the citizen. Schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons resemble the panopticon in that they examine pupils, workers, patients, and prisoners--they classify them as individuals and try to make them conform to a norm. And the modern citizen spends much of his life in at least some of these institutions--"we are in the panoptic machine!"
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