The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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against the norm, ranked, classiied, and ultimately reformed toward the norm. Those who comply with the norm are rewarded and given a higher status within the hierarchy, whereas those who do not receive further training and discipline. The effective use of hierarchical observation requires the distribution of individual bodies in space through enclosure, partitioning, and other methods (EDP, 141). It also dictates “their separation, their alignment, their serialization, and their surveillance” within a ield of visibility (ECF-SMD, 242). By doing so, discipline creates “functional sites,” spaces in which individuals are located and supervised rather than being excluded. But the distribution of individuals is not merely spatial – discipline is also “an art of rank” in which bodies do not occupy a ixed position but circulate through a network of relations (EDP, 146). Places and ranks are disciplinarily created spaces that are “simultaneously architectural, functional and hierarchical” and transform “dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” (EDP, 148). By fostering a desire for eficiency and good order, the supervision and distribution of bodies seeks to eliminate spaces in which individuals might form collectives and resist.

The technologies of discipline also require the control of activity and the detailed partitioning of time. The two are intertwined: “In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time, nothing must remain idle or useless” (EDP, 152). By analyzing space and rearranging activities, discipline becomes the machinery for adding up and capitalizing time, and time itself becomes an aspect of the norm and normative judgment, a means for measuring the extent to which individuals are dominated by discipline. Through the coordination of movement, gesture, and time, disciplinary power extracts from time “ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces” (EDP, 153). In the end, individuals cannot escape time; they can only become more eficient in time, and thereby more eficiently dominated.

An individual subjected to these technologies “assumes responsibility for the constraints of power,” inscribes “the power relation” within himself, and thereby “becomes the principle of his own subjection” (EDP, 202–203). In effect, discipline trains individuals to become the front-line agents of their own repression. And, in doing so, discipline creates individuals who are easily managed and have great utility for the state.

Through the process of normalization – the “means of correct training” – disciplinary power shapes our notions of what is natural and correct and thus determines our corresponding behaviors, and it does so even in the most routine circumstances. For example, imagine that a teacher enters a kindergarten classroom and rings a bell. The bell signals to the children that they should take their seats, become silent, and await instruction. The ringing of the bell is a simple examination, and the students have learned that this is a moment in which they are being judged for their behavior. The teacher observes the students hierarchically, and the normalizing judgment is this: Do they comply, and how quickly do they take their seats and stop talking? Do

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they display the proper attitude? And if they do not, what do they do instead? To the extent that students either do or do not master the norm associated with the ringing of the bell, they are deemed to be “good” pupils who are rewarded and promoted for their correct behavior or “bad” pupils in need of further training and in danger of not moving on. The students have internalized that judgment, and by ringing the bell and observing their behavior, the teacher is coercing their compliance with the norm through her normative gaze. For Foucault, the process is a type of control without punishment (“penality”), because individual pupils are rewarded only after an examination, and those who fail to comply with the norm will be shamed for noncompliance and retrained.

Education is a continuous application of all three disciplinary technologies, and it demonstrates the degree to which we accept disciplinary power as common. Hence, education trains us to become accustomed to the partitioning of space, time, and movement, and the system of ranking and rewards encourages individuals to accept the norm. As Foucault explains, “disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination” (EDP, 138). As individuals are rewarded and promoted for their success at complying with the norm, they become increasingly invested in maintaining the norm and the disciplinary process by which they are judged and ranked. This effect is starkly evident in American law schools, where students become obsessed with both the ranking of particular schools and their individual class ranking, and the best students from the best schools become the next generation of law professors – the individuals charged with the discipline of future students. Individuals are thereby deined (and deine themselves) by the place they occupy in a hierarchy: their relationship within the context of the whole and to others within that whole. This is why Foucault asserts that individuality is an effect of power.

Foucault uses a variety of modern institutions to illustrate the technologies of discipline (including the military, schools, hospitals, and factories), but the modern prison is his archetypal model for the exercise of discipline and disciplinary power within modern society. Although Foucault did prisoner reform work in France with Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), he did not visit a prison until 1971, when he came to the United States and toured the Attica Correctional Facility in New York state. Foucault’s visit to Attica and his reading of Black Panther literature are thought to have inluenced his writings on power and possibly prisons.

The “Panopticon,” an adaptation of Bentham’s concept for the ideal prison, is Foucault’s model for the eficient operation of disciplinary technology. It features a central tower with cells surrounding the tower in a backlit circle, an arrangement that allows a central supervisor located in the tower to observe each and every one of the prisoners in their cells. But the Panopticon is more than simply a model prison: it is a symbolic and “generalizable model of functioning” that illustrates the effect of disciplinary technology in everyday life. In its various forms, the panoptic schema

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serves “to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to conine the insane, [and] to supervise workers” (EDP, 205). The panoptic mechanism is starkly different from a dungeon, and it highlights the ways in which disciplinary power operates differently from sovereign power. Whereas the dungeon is dark, conined, and hidden away, the Panopticon is well lit and visible. The structure of the central tower makes it impossible for a prisoner to verify, at any given moment, whether he or she is being observed. Ultimately, the prisoners are complicit in their own domination: they behave as if they are constantly under surveillance and consequently conform their behavior to the norm. The result is the “automatic functioning of power” through “permanent surveillance” and without the immediate use of force (EDP, 201). In short, the inmates are “caught up in a power situation in which they themselves are the bearers” (ibid.). For Foucault, the elegance of the panoptic mechanism is that disciplinary power functions on multiple levels without the need to physically manipulate prisoners. In the Panopticon, “visibility is a trap” (EDP, 200) in which the inmates themselves are permanently visible and, in Bentham’s words, power itself is both “visible and unveriiable” (EDP, 201). Given these circumstances, the individual prisoners ultimately discipline themselves, and their domination is not dependent on any other person. Anyone can take the supervisor’s place in the central tower, whereas sovereign power required a speciic individual who served as the monarch and who was not interchangeable. Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon thus allows us to see more clearly how disciplinary power operates without a sovereign or the spectacle of public violence.

In the inal section of volume one of The History of Sexuality and in lectures that date from soon after the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault begins to argue that a “new technology of power” – which he calls biopower – emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century (ECF-SMD, 242). In Foucault’s view, the move away from sovereign power came about through two distinct shifts. First, beginning in the seventeenth century, disciplinary power emerged as an adaptation to demographic explosion and industrialization. And then, in the nineteenth century, there was a second adjustment, which he calls biopower, a power grounded in “the bio-sociological processes characteristic of human masses” (ECF-SMD, 249–250).

Foucault thus conceives of two technologies of power, which were established at different times and yet superimposed on each other. The earlier technology, discipline, centers on the body and produces individualizing effects by manipulating the body “as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful and docile” (ECF-SMD, 249). The second technology, biopower, is centered on large populations rather than individual bodies. In Foucault’s words, biopower is “addressed to a multitude of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form ... a global mass that is affected by overall processes, characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on” (ECF-SMD, 243). Under biopower, the focus is on the entire population and on the traits that

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are deemed to be characteristic of that population. The relationship between disciplinary power and biopower has become increasingly controversial. Some scholars view biopower as a distinct shift away from disciplinary power, whereas others see a more intimate relationship between the two. Efforts to understand the relationship are complicated by the fact that Foucault constantly reevaluates the various forms of power in his growing corpus of previously unpublished lectures. Foucault’s lectures from 1975–1976, “Society Must Be Defended,” directly treat the interrelationship between disciplinary power and biopower, but they were not intended to be a formal published text. Notwithstanding these dificulties, the lectures in Society Must Be Defended suggest that biopower is superimposed on disciplinary power but does not supplant it. Biopower does not exclude disciplinary technology, “but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of iniltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques” (ECF-SMD, 242). This new form of power “exists at a different level on a different scale, because it has a different bearing area and makes use of very different instruments” (ibid.). Both disciplinary power and biopower rely on the norm as a method of control. “The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline, and a population which one wishes to regularize” (ECF-SMD, 253). But where discipline operates through institutions in which individuals are situated (such as schools, hospitals, or factories), biopower operates through the state apparatus. One can view Foucault’s move to biopower as a way to account for the individual effects of power and the way that power creates individuals, while simultaneously seeking to understand the mass effects of power and develop coalitions through which individuals might collectively resist the effects of power. In his later work, Foucault turns away from descriptions of how power operates. He focuses instead on ethics and politics as a means of understanding what he describes as the “art of governing.”

Foucault’s critics have offered several distinct objections to his account of disciplinary power. For instance, Foucault has been widely criticized for asserting that power is “ever-present.” Readers often understand this to mean that because power is everywhere, it is futile to ight against it, or that Foucault’s point of view cannot form the basis for effective collective resistance to political domination. That understanding, however, is grounded in a misreading of Foucault’s ideas. Foucault has also been criticized through the lens of several prevailing Western political theories because he refuses to provide either normative standards for the legitimate exercise of state authority (as in social contract theory) or a programmatic prescription for political revolution (as in Marxian theory). But Foucault in turn challenges these theories of power for failing to acknowledge the emergence of new forms of power and the resulting transformation of the mechanisms and technologies through which power is exercised.

According to Foucault, social contract theorists mistakenly conceive of power as a static commodity, as one that can be held by a central authority or transferred

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Suggested Reading

Binkley, Sam, and Jorge Capetillo, eds. 2010. A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, new ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Dianna. 2009. “Normativity and Normalization,” Foucault Studies 7:45–63.

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within it. Foucault terms the sum of these statements a discourse’s “archive,” and this archive determines which new statements are or are not possible and who can or cannot speak them. These discourses are not ixed and invariable, but rather are bound by all the prior statements and altered by every new statement that is made within a given discourse. Discourses can arise, be transformed, and disappear; they are fragmentary and incomplete. Once discourses have been recognized as the organizing fulcrum or framework for sciences and disciplines, then other apparent “continuities” – the book, the oeuvre, the author, etc. – can be displaced, and the rules and regularities actually governing statements’ interactions can be discerned.

According to Foucault, “[D]iscourse is constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements.... [T]he term discourse can be deined as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation” (EAK, 107). Hence, discourse constitutes a “network of statements” that “forms a complex web” (EAK, 99, 98). It is this network that gives statements their status and coherence. This ield within which statements are situated includes (1) “all the other formulations with which the statement appears,” (2) “all the formulations to which the statement refers,” (3) “all the formulations whose subsequent possibility is determined by the statement,” and (4) “all the formulations whose status the statement in question shares” (EAK, 98–99). Discourse does not presuppose a sovereign subject or cogito (and thus allows a critique of the philosophy of the subject and an escape from the “crisis that concerns that transcendental relexion with which philosophy since Kant has identiied itself; ... which, above all, concerns the status of the subject” [EAK, 204]). Instead, discursive regularities establish who can speak, in what voice, and with what authority. For example, with the rise of hospitals and clinics, medical discourse will be restricted to clinically trained doctors – only doctors will be able to make medical judgments or pronouncements with authority; other “practitioners,” such as midwives, will be marginalized and discounted. Hence, discourses serve ultimately to delimit and deine what constitutes knowledge:

Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is speciied by that fact ...; knowledge is also the space in which the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse ...; knowledge is also the ield of coordination and subordination of statements in which concepts appear, and are deined, applied, and transformed ...; lastly, knowledge is deined by the possibilities of use and appropriation offered by discourse.... [T]here is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice. (EAK, 182–183)

In sum, discourses are the complex networks of statements that make knowledge possible; that delimit what can be said, or understood, within a particular discourse; and that determine who can speak (or at least speak with authority or be heard)

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within that discourse. They are, in this sense, a priori – they establish the conditions of existence for any given statement. But discourses are themselves transient, discontinuous, and situated within a history that makes their alteration and disappearance possible:

Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; ... it is, from beginning to end, historical – a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the speciic modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the midst of the complicities of time. (EAK, 117)

The Archaeology of Knowledge represents the acme of Foucault’s epistemological work.

Because he attempts to use discursive formations as the framework within which historical and philosophical phenomena are to be studied, he has been characterized as a “structuralist” – a label that he very explicitly rejected. Foucault’s analysis of discursive formations is, however, analogous to other, “coherentist” epistemological approaches – approaches that claim a belief is justiied not because it rests on a foundation but because of its coherence or connection with other beliefs (Kvanvig 2008). American philosopher William James articulated such a theory of truth in his 1907 lectures on Pragmatism: “[I]deas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience” (James 1981, 30). And Otto Neurath (a member of the Vienna Circle) argues that science as a whole is coherentist: “[W]e still know that basically ‘everything is luid’, that multiplicity and uncertainty exist in all science, that there is no tabula rasa for us that we could use as a safe foundation on which to heap layers upon layers. The whole of science is basically always under discussion”

(Neurath 1983, 118, Neurath’s italics). Foucault’s account is largely in agreement with Neurath’s account of science – what is “true” is a function of the discursive formation’s rules and regularities, what the discourse permits – but archaeological description seeks to work at a metalevel, analyzing the rules behind the transformations in discourses themselves.

We have seen that Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge in part to “correct and criticize” aspects of his earlier work and thought. But this text did not constitute a inal word either. Foucault continued to criticize, revise, and correct his own thinking, and hence, in his later “genealogical” and “ethical” periods, “discourse” no longer held a central organizing/framing role for his analyses. A number of the themes on which Foucault would later focus, as well as some of the later revisions and corrections of the Archaeology, can already be detected in it. First, several themes are touched on that will become much more important foci in volume one of The History of Sexuality. One such theme is “repression,” about which Foucault is suspicious in both works. In the Archaeology, Foucault explicitly states that statements’

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“exclusions” are not to be understood as repression: “[W]e do not presuppose that beneath manifest statements something remains hidden and subjacent” (EAK, 119). In The History of Sexuality, Foucault will explicitly challenge “the repressive hypothesis” as a misunderstanding of sexual discourse. Sexuality, too (the central topic of the later work), is a theme anticipated in the Archaeology. In its closing chapters,

Foucault proposes “the archaeological description of ‘sexuality’” as a possible direction that he could pursue:

Such an archaeology would show, if it succeeded in its task, how the prohibitions, exclusions, limitations, values, freedoms, and transgressions of sexuality, all its manifestations, verbal or otherwise, are linked to a particular discursive practice ... [a]n analysis that would be carried out not in the direction of the episteme, but in that of what we might call the ethical. (EAK, 193)

But there are also a number of tensions within the Archaeology with which Foucault will struggle. One important such tension is the relationship between discourses and “non-discursive reality.” The Archaeology’s analyses are focused on discourses and say very little about nondiscursive objects; however, a “complete” approach cannot neglect these elements. And Foucault’s later works will much more explicitly bring the nondiscursive into his analytic framework. This shift will displace discourse from its central, framing position – a position that will in the coming years be occupied by power relations. Indeed, power relations are already implicit in much of what Foucault says in the Archaeology, in his discussion of discursive “strategies,” and even in his understanding of discourse itself:

In this sense, discourse ... appears as an asset – inite, limited, desirable, useful – that has its own rules of appearance, but also its own conditions of appropriation and operation; an asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only in its “practical applications”), poses the question of power; an asset that is by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle. (EAK, 120)

Indeed, one of the key concepts that Foucault is able to deine on the basis of his analysis of discourse – knowledge (the book is, after all, entitled The Archaeology of Knowledge) – will be conjoined in later analyses with power: “power/knowledge.”

As Foucault increasingly emphasized analysis of nondiscursive elements, discourse still remained an important concept or analytical tool, but it was no longer the central organizing frame for his analyses. Discourse, in Foucault’s later works, is better understood as speech, language, whether spoken or written, an important part of but no longer the critical framework for understanding our social milieu. This shift is quite clear in volume one of The History of Sexuality. An important component of this