Power in the modern era resides in disciplinary techniques that act as a system of surveillance, and as such, power is no longer just a prohibitive and repressive tool of the sovereign (Foucault in Gunning 1980:104-105). Power in this model does not emanate from central source but circulates throughout entire the social body (Foucault in Gunning 1980:96-99). Foucault demonstrates the nature of the change in power by showing how the techniques of punishment changed. A system of incarceration replaced the various forms of death and other corporal punishments administered in public. The element of spectacle and public ceremony surrounding punishment was replaced with short legal and administrative ritual as the only public accompaniment. The physical nature of the punishment became hidden and concealed (Foucault 1975:8-9). The target of punishment also shifted with the introduction of disciplinary techniques. The penalty was no longer aimed solely at the body of the offender with the infliction of pain and torture as the main form of deterrence. Instead imprisonment and the deprivation of liberty and civil rights became the main penalty (Foucault 1975:8-9). The various disciplinary techniques adopted in the modern era cause power to operate continuously. Whereas sovereign power was discontinuous and intermittent, requiring the presence of an agent to apply force, the uninterrupted visibility of surveillance does not require such presence.
Punishment will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process[…] its effectiveness is seen as resulting from it inevitability not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not he horrifying spectacle of public punishment must discourage crime (Foucault 1975:9).
The central tenet of modern disciplinary power is that it is of a productive and useful nature. Power operates to produce docile bodies, and the body is seen as something to be manipulated shaped trained and made to obey (Foucault 1975: 136). The method used to achieve this is one of certain techniques of corrective training. The emphasis in society is on rational procedures as the most effective way of inducing certain bodily effects. The aim of disciplinary techniques is to extend skills of the body and to reorganise the body's forces so as to foster 'useful' obedience. The productive nature of modern power accords with the envisaged rise of capitalism evident in society at the time:
[W]ithout the insertion for disciplined, orderly individuals into the machinery of production, the new demands of capitalism would have been stymied (Dreyfus and Rabinow, p135).
According to Foucault, power operating via modern disciplinary techniques is more penetrating than earlier forms of power. The tactics and techniques of modern power operate to discipline people through their social practices and not just through their beliefs. Power "gets hold of its objects at the deepest level - in their gestures, habits bodies and desires" (Fraser 1989:24).
A comprehensive description and discussion of the operation of modern disciplinary techniques of power requires an understanding of the role that knowledge plays in Foucault's account since the concepts of power and knowledge are inexorably linked.
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (Foucault 1975:27-8).
The modern re-configuration of knowledge developed alongside the techniques of power in the context of a transformation of the human sciences. The emergence of a normative social science that aimed to regulate people's activity and encourage people to achieve their own conformity by moulding them into 'normal' forms meant that knowledge gained on the basis of disciplinary power is formulated according to 'norms of behaviour'. In the case of the prison system, the offender became the object of knowledge. The focus shifted from the offender's acts to the offender's life and both the mind and body of the criminal were surveyed and constrained. Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon, a prison that allows guards to see continuously inside each cell from a central observing tower, to illustrate the systematic knowledge of individuals through surveillance:
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. […]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 (Foucault 1975:201-202).
This constant gaze controls the prisoners affecting not only what they do but how the see themselves (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 43-67). Power is exercised by making the target visible and audible, the behaviour is hence knowable and known, thus acting as a constraint by making people's actions visible and constraining them to speak.
The Prison is just one example of an institution where disciplinary techniques operate to make individuals known and to produce docile bodies. Techniques, which are evident in the prison, function in such a way that they can be transferred and appropriated in any institution. Foucault outlines four disciplinary techniques that are appropriated in institutions such as monasteries, schools, hospitals and factories. The mechanisms by which power renders its objects visible, audible and knowable while power itself remains anonymous are, in brief: the spatial distribution of individuals, a controlled and detailed prescription of activities (timetabling), organisation of stages of training and a general co-ordination of links between the arranged bodies and their respective activities are put into operation. The means through which the latter disciplinary techniques are instituted include modes of hierarchical observation, normalising judgment and examination and assessment (Foucault 1975:141-194). The ease with which disciplinary techniques can be transferred result in a continually augmenting and increasingly forceful operation of power.
The implications of the interconnection between knowledge and power described by Foucault have the effect of transforming the relation between the subject and power into one where individuals are the objects, the subjects and the effects of power and knowledge. The intensification of power that Foucault describes, where power is more anonymous, more functional and more individualising is polemically against the idea that knowledge is emancipatory and effects fairer power relations. Foucault believes that knowledge is in fact a technique of subjectification. Knowledge has no autonomy from dominant power relations and therefore is little more than an instrument and effect of domination. On Foucault's account, the subject will always be an effect of power relations, with no possibility of escape from domination of one sort or another.
Foucault's aim is to isolate, identify, and analyse the web of unequal relationships set up by political technologies which underlies and undercuts the theoretical equality posited by the law and political philosophers. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:185)
Foucault has been criticised for the failure of his descriptive analyses of power to provide criteria for judgment; a basis upon which to condemn some regimes of power as oppressive or to applaud others as involving progress in human freedom (Fraser 1989:18; Taylor 1984:80-81). Foucault claims that he does not intend a value evaluation of power. He describes his approach to the development of power as a "genealogy" that aims to demonstrate that cultural practices are instituted historically and are therefore contingent. He is not concerned with evaluating the contents of the human sciences or systems of knowledge but with the processes, procedures and apparatuses that produce knowledge and belief (Fraser 1989:19).
Because Foucault has no basis for distinguishing, for example, forms of power that involve domination from those that do not, he appears to endorse a one-sided, wholesale rejection of modernity as such ... Clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power (Fraser 1989:29).
The tone of Foucault's portrayal of the interconnection between power and knowledge indicates that the relation between subject and power is one of increased domination and as such encompasses the possibility of a critical knowledge that "would speak the truth to power, exposing domination for what it is and thereby enabling or encouraging effective resistance to it" (Ruse in Gutting 1994:99). It is alleged that his account of power is not in fact neutral or unengaged (Fraser 1989:28). Foucault's description indicates that modern disciplinary power is in fact more insidious than sovereign power. Where previously power could only destroy or coerce its subjects using brute force, modern disciplinary power "produces subjected and practiced bodies" (Foucault 1975:138). Foucault describes an intensification of power relations and appears to judge the docile body as being more subjected than the tortured body. Yet, Foucault offers no alternative ideal; no conception either of human being or of human society freed from the bonds of power.
The normative framework of understanding from which the criticisms of Foucault are levered assume the very things that Foucault wants to contest; that there is in fact an external basis from which power can be criticised and that power operates in a negative fashion. It does not matter that Foucault by his own methodology can not assess power as being good or bad, since it is not his goal to pass a value judgement. Foucault is simply describing the increasingly coercive forms of power.
Foucault purports that the discourse on rights that accompanied the move to modern disciplinary rights as a more legitimate form of power does not accurately interpret the operation of power. Foucault believes that the notion of free consenting individual is a fiction and that the contract model misleads people. The main fault of the contract tradition, according to Foucault is that it is based on a justification of power as opposed to the workings of power. The obsession with legitimacy of power obscures the brute force with which power is applied since it only assesses one form of power, the central power of the governing institution, and not power in its multifarious forms.
To this end Foucault has achieved his goal in Discipline and Punish. He demonstrates that modern power, its operation in society in general, financed by knowledge derived from the human sciences, is of the same form as power operating in the prison system. Foucault's account of power in Discipline and Punish has the effect of challenging existing belief systems and theories of association by offering an insight into the operation of power.
At this point I end a book that must serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalisation and the formation of knowledge in modern society (Foucault 1975:308).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Cousins, M. and Hussain, A. Michel Foucault (London: Macmillan Education Ltd, 1984).
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Fraser, N. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989).
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Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991)
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Foucault M. "Power/Knowledge". In Two Lectures. Ed. Gordon, Colin (Harvester Press, 1980)
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Rabinow and Dreyfus. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
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Rouse, J. "Power/Knowledge". In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Ed. Gutting, Gary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 92 - 115.
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Taylor, C. "Foucault on Freedom and Truth". In Foucault - A Critical Reader
