Notes for 10/12/11: Panopticism

Today the group discussed the Panopticism chapter in Discipline and Punish, pp. 195-228.

What does it mean to say that disciplinary techniques are polyvalent? At the end of the chapter, Foucault offers a memorable quote: "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" But what are the core features of discipline that allow one to speak of its recurrence from one context to the next? With this question in mind, the group discussed the interrelation of two quotes from the text.

First, on page 202 Foucault writes: "He who is subjected 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 relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw of its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal..." This quote demonstrates that in addition to efforts to monitor and coerce the body from without, an essential characteristic of discipline is the participation of the subject in processes of his own subjection. In fact, the complicity of the subject is a necessary feature to the workings of disciplinary power.

Second, on page 215 Foucault writes: "Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology." Thus, discipline is not identified with the prison itself, nor with the panopticon. Discipline is not an object or set of rules: it is best conceived as a mode of power, a way of operating.

Discipline is a mode of power that is best characterized as the intersection of coercive practices that monitor, or micromanage the behavior of the subject, and the internalization of these coercive practices by the participating subject. Or something like that. At any rate, in a particular historical period, 'the individual' was crafted through endless immersion in disciplinary practices.

The discussion then shifted to a comparison between disciplinary practices and practices of care of the self. How does one distinguish between these two types of practices if both contain the interworkings of both techniques of power and techniques of the self. It was posited that perhaps the distinction between discipline and care of the self hinges of the ethics embedded in each practice. Discipline carries an ethics of self-decipherment or self-discovery. Notice on page 198 Foucault writes that discipline does not operate through "masks that were put on and taken off, but [through] the assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body, his 'true' disease." In contrast, care of the self has as its telos an ethics of self-transformation. It was then suggested that in order for this distinction between self-discovery and self-transformation to hold, Foucault must grant some kind of agency, capacity for self-reflection, or autonomy to the subject. For how can a subject self-transform if it is either unaware of its situation or incapable of working toward self-transformation. Perhaps self-transformation requires self-awareness and autonomy. As we discussed last week, ethics is the conscious practice of freedom (Essential Works, Vol. 1, pp. 284). Or perhaps we should ditch concepts such as autonomy altogether and focus strictly on practices altogether. Disciplinary practices. Self-transformative practices.

Oh, and we debated the ethics of Self Magazine (great title!) and Cosmopolitan Magazine in relation to the distinction between discipline and care of the self.