No More Learning

To summarize this second aspect of disciplinary power, which we could call the panoptic character of disciplinary power, the absolute and constant visibility surrounding the bodies of individuals, I think we could say the following: the panoptic principle--seeing everything, everyone, all the time--organizes a genetic polarity of time; it proceeds towards a centralized individualization the support and instrument of which is writing; and finally, it involves a punitive and continuous action on potential behavior that, behind the body itself, projects some- thing like a psyche.
Finally, the third characteristic distinguishing disciplinary power from the apparatus of sovereignty is that a disciplinary apparatus is isotopic or, at least, tends towards isotopy. This means a number of things.
First of all, every element in a disciplinary apparatus has its well defined place; it has its subordinate elements and its superordinate elements. Grades in the army, or again in the school, the clear distinc tion between classes of different age groups, between different ranks within age groups, all of this, which was established in the eighteenth century, is a superb example of this isotopy. To show how far this went, we should not forget that in classes that were disciplinarized according to the Jesuit model,12 and above all in the model of the school of the Brethren of the Common Life, the individual's place in the class was determined by where he was ranked in his school results. 13 So what was called the individual's locus was both his place in the class and his rank in the hierarchy of values and success. This is a fine example of the isotopy of the disciplinary system.
Consequently, movement in this system cannot be produced through discontinuity, dispute, favor, etcetera; it cannot be produced as the result of a breach, as was the case for the power of sovereignty, but is produced by a regular movement of examination, competition, seniority, and suchlike.
? But isotopic also means that there is no conflict or incompatibility between these different systems; different disciplinary apparatuses must be able to connect up with each other. Precisely because of this codification, this schematization, because of the formal properties of the disciplinary apparatus, it must always be possible to pass rrom one to the other. Thus, school classifications are projected, with some modification, but without too much difficulty, into the social-technical hierarchies of the adult world. The hierarchism in the disciplinary and military system takes up, while transforming them, the disciplinary hierarchies found in the civil system. In short, there is an almost absolute isotopy of these different systems.
Finally, in the disciplinary system, isotopic means above all that the principle of distribution and classification of all the elements necessarily entails something like a residue. That is to say, there is always something like "the unclassifiable. ,, The wall one came up against in relations ot sov ereignty was the wall between the different systems of sovereignty; disputes and conflicts, the kind of permanent war between different systems, was the stumbling block for the system of sovereignty. Disciplinary systems, on the other hand, which classify, hierarchize, supervise, and so on, come up against those who cannot be classified, those who escape supervision, those who cannot enter the system of distribution, in short, the residual, the irre- ducible, the unclassifiable, the inassimilable. This will be the stumbling block in the physics of disciplinary power. That is to say, all disciplinary power has its margins. For example, the deserter did not exist prior to dis- ciplined armies, for the deserter was quite simply the future soldier, some- one who left the army so that he could rejoin it if necessary, when he
wanted to, or when he was taken by force. However, as soon as you have a disciplined army, that is to say people who join the army, make a career of it, follow a certain track, and are supervised from end to end, then the deserter is someone who escapes this system and is irreducible to it.
In the same way, you see the appearance of something like the feeble- minded or mentally defective when there is school discipline. 1^ The individual who cannot be reached by school discipline can only exist in relation to this discipline; someone who does not learn to read and write can only appear as a problem, as a limit, when the school adopts the disciplinary schema. In the same way, when does the category of
21 November 1973 53
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delinquent appear? Delinquents are not law breakers. It is true that the correlate of every law is the existence ol olfenders who break the law, but the delinquents as an inassimilable, irreducible group can only appear when it is picked out in relation to a police discipline. As for the mentally ill, they are no doubt the residue of all residues, the residue ol all the disciplines, those who are inassimilable to all of a society's educational, military, and police disciplines.
So the necessary existence ol residues is, I think, a specific character istic ol this isotopy of disciplinary systems, and it will entail, ol course, the appearance ol supplementary disciplinary systems in order to retrieve these individuals, and so on to infinity. Since there are the leeble minded, that is to say, individuals inaccessible to school disci pline, schools for the feeble-minded will be created, and then schools for those who are inaccessible to schools for the feeble minded. It is the same with respect to delinquents; in a way, the organization ol the "underworld" was lormed partly by the police and partly by the hard core themselves. The underworld is a way of making the delinquent col- laborate in the work ol the police. We can say that the underworld is the discipline of those who are inaccessible to police discipline.
In short, disciplinary power has this double property of being "anomizing," that is to say, always discarding certain individuals, bringing anomie, the irreducible, to light, and ol always being normalizing, that is to say, inventing ever new recovery systems, always reestablishing the rule. What characterizes disciplinary systems is the never ending work ol the norm in the anomie.
I think all this can be summarized by saying that the major effect ol disciplinary power is what could be called the reorganization in depth of the relations between somatic singularity, the subject, and the individual. In the power of sovereignty, in that form ol exercising power, I tried to show you how procedures of individualization take shape at the summit, that there was an underlying individualization on the side ol the sovereign, with that game of multiple bodies that determines that individuality is lost at the very moment it appears. On the other hand, it seems to me that the individual function disappears at the summit of disciplinary systems, on the side ol those who exercise this power and make these systems work.
? A disciplinary system is made so that it works by itself, and the per- son who is in charge of it, or is its director, is not so much an individual as a function that is exercised by this and that person and that could equally be exercised by someone else, which is never the case in the indi- vidualization of sovereignty. Moreover, even the person in charge of a disciplinary system is caught up within a broader system in which he is supervised in turn, and at the heart of which he is himself subject to dis cipline. There is then, I think, an elimination of individualization at the top. On the other hand, the disciplinary system entails, and I think this is essential, a very strong underlying individualization at the base.
I tried to show you that the subject-function in the power of sover eignty is never fastened to a somatic singularity, except m incidental cases like the ceremony, branding, violence, and so on, but that most of the time, and outside of these rituals, the subject-function moves around above and below somatic singularities. In disciplinary power, on the other hand, the subject-function is fitted exactly on the somatic singularity: the subject function of disciplinary power is applied and brought to bear on the body, on its actions, place, movements, strength, the moments of its life, and its discourses, on all of this. Discipline is that technique of power by which the subject-function is exactly super- imposed and fastened on the somatic singularity.
In a word, we can say that disciplinary power, and this is no doubt its fundamental property, fabricates subjected bodies; it pins the subject- function exactly to the body. It fabricates and distributes subjected bod ies; it is individualizing [only in that] the individual is nothing other than the subjected body. And all this mechanics of discipline can be sum marized by saying this: Disciplinary power is individualizing because it fastens the subject-function to the somatic singularity by means of a sys- tem of supervision-writing, or by a system of pangraphic panopticism, which behind the somatic singularity projects, as its extension or as its beginning, a core of virtualities, a psyche, and which further establishes the norm as the principle of division and normalization, as the universal prescription for all individuals constituted in this way.
There is a series in disciplinary power, therefore, that brings together the subject-function, somatic singularity, perpetual observation, writing, the mechanism of infinitesimal punishment, projection of the psyche,
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and, finally, the division between normal and abnormal. All this constitutes the disciplinary individual and finally fits somatic singular- ity together with political power. What we may call the individual is not what political power latches on to; what we should call the individual is the effect produced on the somatic singularity, the result of this pinning, by the techniques of political power I have indicated. In no way am I saying that disciplinary power is the only procedure of individuahza- tion that has existed in our civilization, and I will try to come back to this next week, but I wanted to say that discipline is this terminal, capillary form of power that constitutes the individual as target, partner, and vis-a-vis in the relationship of power.
To that extent, and if what I have been saying is true, you can see that we cannot say that the individual pre-exists the subject-function, the projection of a psyche, or the normalizing agency On the contrary, it is insofar as the somatic singularity became the bearer of the subject function through disciplinary mechanisms that the individual appeared within a political system. The individual was constituted insofar as uninterrupted supervision, continual writing, and potential punish- ment enframed this subjected body and extracted a psyche from it. It has been possible to distinguish the individual only insofar as the normal- izing agency has distributed, excluded, and constantly taken up again this body-psyche.
There is no point then in wanting to dismantle hierarchies, con- straints, and prohibitions so that the individual can appear, as if the individual was something existing beneath all relationships of power, preexisting relationships of power, and unduly weighed down by them. In fact, the individual is the result of something that is prior to it: this mechanism, these procedures, which pin political power on the body. It is because the body has been "subjectified," that is to say, that the subject-function has been fixed on it, because it has been psychologized and normalized, it is because of all this that something like the individ- ual appeared, about which one can speak, hold discourses, and attempt to found sciences.
The sciences of man, considered at any rate as sciences of the individual, are only the effect of this series of procedures. And it seems to me that you can see that it would be absolutely false historically, and so politically,
? to appeal to the original rights of the individual against something like the subject, the norm, or psychology. Actually, right from the start, and in virtue of these mechanisms, the individual is a normal subject, a psy- chologically normal subject; and consequently desubjectification, denor- malization, and depsychologization necessarily entail the destruction of the individual as such. Demdividuahzation goes hand in hand with these three other operations I have mentioned.
I would like to add just one last word. We are used to seeing the emergence of the individual in European political thought and reality as the effect of a process of both the development of the capitalist economy and the demand for political power by the bourgeoisie. The philosophico- jundical theory of individuality, which develops, more or less, from Hobbes up to the French Revolution, would arise from this. 13 However, although it is true that there is a way of thinking about the individual at this level, I think we should equally see the real constitution of the indi vidual on the basis of a certain technology of power. Discipline seems to me to be this technology, specific to the power that is born and develops from the classical age, and which, on the basis of this game of bodies, isolates and cuts out what I think is an historically new element that we call the individual.
We could say, if you like, that there is a kind of juridico-disciplinary pincers of individualism. There is the juridical individual as he appears in these philosophical or juridical theories: the individual as abstract subject, defined by individual rights that no power can limit unless agreed by contract. And then, beneath this, alongside it, there was the development of a whole disciplinary technology that produced the individual as an historical reality, as an element ot the productive forces, and as an element also of political forces. This individual is a subjected body held in a system of supervision and subjected to procedures of normalization.
The function of the discourse of the human sciences is precisely to twin, to couple this juridical individual and disciplinary individual, to make us believe that the real, natural, and concrete content of the juridical
21 November 1973 57
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individual is the disciplinary individual cut out and constituted by political technology. Scratch the juridical individual, say the (psychological, sociological, and other) human sciences, and you will find a particular kind of man; and what in actual fact they give as man is the disciplinary individual. Conjointly, there is the humanist discourse that is the con- verse of the discourse of the human sciences, taking the opposite direc- tion, and which says: the disciplinary individual is an alienated, enslaved individual, he is not an authentic individual; scratch him, or rather, restore to him the fullness of his rights, and you will find, as his original, living, and perennial form, the philosophico-jundical individ- ual. This game between the juridical individual and the disciplinary individual underlies, I believe, both the discourse of the human sciences and humanist discourse.
What I call Man, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is nothing other than the kind of after image of this oscillation between the juridical individual, which really was the instrument by which, in its discourse, the bourgeoisie claimed power, and the disciplinary indi- vidual, which is the result of the technology employed by this same bourgeoisie to constitute the individual in the field of productive and political forces. From this oscillation between the juridical individual-- ideological instrument of the demand for power--and the disciplinary individual--real instrument of the physical exercise of power--from this oscillation between the power claimed and the power exercised, were born the illusion and the reality of what we call Man. 16
? I. In reality, two forms of the criticism of the asylum institution should be distinguished: (a) In the thirties a critical current emerged tending towards a progressive distancing
Irom the asylum space instituted by the 1838 law as the almost exclusive site ol psy chialnc intervention and the role of which was reduced, as Edouard Toulouse (1865 197l7) said, to that ol a "supervised assistance" ("L'Evolution de la psychiatric" Commemoration ol the foundation ol the Henri Roussel hospital, 30July 1937, p. 7l). Wanting to dissociate the notion ol "mental illness" Irom that ol conlinement in an asylum subject to particular legal and administrative conditions, this current under took "to study by what changes in the organization ol asylums a wider role could be given lo moral and individual treatment" (J. Raynier and H. Beaudouin, VAliene etles Asiles d'alienes au point de vue administralij el furidUjue | Paris: Le Francois, (1922) 1930, 2nd revised and enlarged edition]). In this perspective the traditional hospital cen tered approach was undermined by new approaches: diversilication ol ways ol taking into care, projects lor post cure supervision, and, especially, the appearance ol Iree ser vices illustrated by the installation, at the heart ol the lortress ol asylum psychiatry at Sainte Anne, ol an "open service" the management ol which was entrusted to Edouard Toulouse and which became the Henri Roussel hospital in 1926 (see, E. Toulouse, "L'hopilal Henri Roussel" in La Prophylaxis menlale, no. 43, January July 1937, pp. I 6 9 ) . This movement became ollicial on 13 October 1937 with the circular ol the Minister ol Public Health, Marc Rucart, concerning the organization ol services lor the mentally ill within the departmental Iramework. On this point see, E. Toulouse, Reorganisation de Vhospitalisation des alienes dans les asiles de la Seine (Paris: Imprimene Nouvelle, 1920);J. Raynier and J. Lauzier, La Construction et I'Amenagement de I'hopital psychiatriatte et des asiles d'alienes (Paris: Pyronnet, I935); and G. Daumezon, La Situation du personnel infinnier dans les asiles d'alienes (Pans: Doin, 1935) an account ol the lack ol means available to psychiatric institutions in the nineteen thirties.
( b) In the lorties criticism took another direction, initiated by the communication ol Paul Belvet, at that time director of the hospital ol Saint Alban (Lozerc) which became a relerence point tor all those driven by the desire lor a radical change ol asylum struc tures: "Asile et hopital psychlatncjue. L'experience d'un ctablissmenl rural" in XLIW congiis des Medecins alicnistes ct neurologistes de France et des pays de langne francaise. Monlpelicr, 28-50 octobre 1942 (Paris: Masson, 197|2). At this time a small militant fraction of the professional body became aware that the psychiatric hospital is not only a hospital lor the insane (alienes), but that it is itsell "alienated (aliene)" since it is constituted "into an order that conforms lo the principles and practice ol a social order that excludes what disturbs it. " See, L. Bonnale, "Sources du desaliemsme" in Desaliener? Folie(s) et sociele(s) (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail/Privat, 1991) p. 221. Proposing to reexamine how the psychiatric hospital works in order to turn it into a genuinely therapeutic organization, this current began to question the nature ol the psychiatrist's relationships with patients. See G. Daumezon and L. Bonnale, "Perspectives de relorme psychiatricjue en France depuis la Liberation" 111 XLIV' congres des Medecins alienistes et neurologistes de France et des pays de langue franaise. Geneve, 22-27 juillet 7946(Paris: Masson, 19yl6) pp. 5tt/i 590. See also below, "Course context" pp. 355 36().
2. See the lectures of 12 and 19 December 1973, and 23 January 1977|.
3. J. M. A. Servan, Discours sur I'administration de lajustice criminelle, p. 35.
\. Founded by Gerard Groote (1340 1384) at Deventer in Holland in 1383, the community
ol the "Brethren of the Common Life," inspired by the principles ol the Flemish theolo gian Jan (Johannes) Van Ruysbroek and the Rhenish mysticism ol the lourteenth century (see below, lecture of 28 November 1973, note 9), aimed to lay the bases lor the relorm of teaching by partly transposing spiritual exercises to education. Numerous houses were opened until the end of the fifteenth century at Zwolle, Dellt, Amersloort, Liege, Utrecht, and elsewhere. See, M. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) pp. 163 164; English translation, Discipline and Punish. Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Allen Lane and New York: Pantheon, 1977) pp. 161 162; A. Hyma, The Brethren of the Common Life (Grand Rapids: W. B. Erdmans, 1950); Selected texts ol G.
27 November 7973 59
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PSYCHIATRIC POWER
Groote in M. Michelet, ed. , Le Rhin mystique. De Maitre Eckhart a Thomas a Kempis (Paris: Fayard, 1957); L. Cognet, Introduction aux mystiques rhenofamands (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1968); and, W. Lourdaux, "Freres de la Vie commune" in, Cardinal A. Baudrillard, ed. , Dictionnaire d'histoire et de geographic ecclesiastiques (Pans: Letouzey and Ane, 1977).
5. Written in 1787, in the lorm of letters to an anonymous correspondent, the work was pub-
lished in 1791 with the title: "Panopticon": or, the Inspection-House; containing the idea oj a new principle oj construction applicable to any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection; and in particular to Penitentiary-houses, Prisons, Houses oj industry, Workhouses, Poor Houses, Manufactures, Madhouses, Lazarettos, Hospitals, and Schools; with a
plan of management adapted to the principle; in a series of letters, written in 1787, from Crechoff in White Russia, to afriend in England (in one volume, Dublin: Thomas Byrne, 1791; and in two volumes, London: T. Payne, 1791), included in Jeremy Benlham, Works, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1838 18^3). The most recent, and readily available, edition ol the Panopticon Letters is Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. M. Bozovic (New York
and London: Verso, 1995), and luture references will be to this edition (hereafter The Panopticon^. The twenty one letters, making up the first part, have been translated into French by Maud Sissung in Le Panoptique (Paris: P. Belfond, 1977), preceded by "L'oeil du pouvoir. Entretien avec Michel Foucault" (reprinted in Dits et Ecrits, vol. 3; English trans
lation, "The Eye of Power" trans. Colin Gordon, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon and others [Brighton: The Harvester Press, and New York: Pantheon Books, 1980]). The lirst
French version of Bent ham's Panopticon was, Panoptique. Memoire sur un nouveau principe pour conslruire des maisons d'inspection, et nommement des maisons de force (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1791), republished in GLiwres de Jeremy Benlham. Le Panoptique, Dumont, ed. (Brussels: Louis Hauptman and Co. , 1829) vol. 1, pp. 2^5 262.
6.
7.
8. 9-
10.
11. 12.
13.
E. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); French translation, Les Deux Corps du Roi. Essai sur la theologie polilique du Moyen-Age, trans. J. -P. Genet and N. Genet (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
This point will be developed in Surveiller et Punir, Part 3, "Discipline" ch. 1, "Les corps dociles" pp. 137-171; Discipline and Punish, Pan 3, "Discipline" ch. 1, "Docile Bodies" pp. 135 169.
On the regulations of the Prussian infantry, see, ibid. pp. 159 161; ibid. pp. 158 159.
The 1667 edict lor the establishment ol a manufacture of furniture lor the crown al the Gobelins lixed the recruitment and conditions of the apprentices, organized a corporative apprenticeship, and founded a school of design. A new regulation was established in 1737. See E. Gerspach, ed. , La Manufacture nationale des Gobelins (Paris: Delagrave, 1892). See, Surveillir et Punir, pp.
158-159; Discipline and Punish, pp. 156 157.
Surveillir et Punir, pp. 215 219; Discipline and Punish, pp. 213 217. On police records in the eighteenth century, see M. Chassaigne, La Lieutenance generate de police de Paris (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1906).
E. Gerspach, ed. , La Manufacture nationale des Gobelins, pp. 156 160: "Reglement de 1680 imposant de chanter a voix basse des cantiques dans 1'atelier. "
Imposed on Jesuit houses by a circular of 8 January 1599, the Ratio Studiorum, draited in 1586, organized the division of studies by classes split into two camps, and the latter into decunes, at the head ol which was a decunon responsible lor supervision. See, C. de Rochemonteix, Un college de jesuites aux XVIT et XVIII' siecles: le college Henri IV de La Pleche (Le Mans: Legutcheux, 1889) vol. 1, pp. 6-7 and pp. 51 12. See Surveillir et Punir, pp. V\l-
1^8; Discipline and Punish, pp. V|6-147.
Foucault is alluding to the innovation introduced by Jean Cele (1375 17|17), director of the Zwolle school, distributing students into classes each having its own program, person in charge, and place within the school, students being placed in a particular class on the basis
of their results. See, G. Mir, Aux sources de la pedagogic des jesuites. Le "Modus Parisiensis" (Rome: Bibliotheca Instituti Historici, 1968) vol. XXVIII, pp. 172 173; M. J. Gaulres, "Histoire du plan d'etudes protestant" in Bulletin de Vhistoire du proiestantisme
? francais, vol. XXV , 1889. See Surveillir et Punir, pp. 162 163; Discipline and Punish, pp. 159- 161.
14. Thus, in 1904 the Minister ol Public Education created a commission to "study the means
to be used to ensure primary education . . . for all 'abnormal and backward children'. " It was within this framework that in 1905 Alfred Binet (1857 1911) was given responsibil-
ity ior defining the means lor screening retarded children. With Theodore Simon (1873- 1961), director of the children's colony of Perray Vaucluse, he conducted inquiries by means ol questionnaires in the schools of the hrst and second arondissements of Pans, and, together with Simon, perfected a "metrical scale of intelligence lor the purpose ol evaluat- ing development retardation. " See, A. Binet and T. Simon, "Applications des methodes nouvelles au diagnostic du niveau intellectuel chez les enlants normaux et anormax d'hos- pice et d'ecole" in L'Annee pschologigue, vol. XI, 1905, pp. 245 336. The feeble minded (debiles mentaux) [the English translator uses the term "mentally defective"; G. B. ] are then defined by a common "negative" characteristic: "by their physical and intellectual organi- zation these children are rendered incapable of benefiting from the ordinary methods ol instruction in use in the public schools" A. Binet and T. Simon, Les Enjants anormaux. Guide pour Vadmission des enjants anormaux dans les classes de perfectionnement, with a preface by Leon Bourgeois (Paris: A. Colin, 1907) p. 7; English translation, Mentally Defective Children, trans. W. B. Drummond (London: Edward Arnold, 1914) p. 3- See, G. Nechine, "Idiots, debiles et savants au XIX0 siecle" in R. Zazzo, Les Debilites mentales (Paris: A. Colin, 1969) pp. 70 107; and, F. Muel, "L'ecole obligatoire et I'invention de I'enfance anormale" in Actes de la recherche en sciences socials, no. 1, January 1975, pp. 6 0 74.
15- See C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); French translation, La Theorie politique de I'individualismepossessif de Hobbes a Locke, trans. M. Fuchs (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
16. See, M. Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu"; "My body, this paper, this lire. "
27 November 7973 61
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28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops; workers*
cities. r^ Theformalization of these apparatuses in Jeremy Benthamfs model of the Panopticon. ^ Thefamily institution and
emergence of the Psy function.
I WILL BEGIN WITH some remarks on the history of these disciplinary apparatuses (dispositifs). Last week tried to describe them rather abstractly, without any diachronic dimension and apart from any system of causes that may have led to their establishment and general ization. What I described is a sort of apparatus (appareil) or machinery, the major forms of which are clearly apparent in the seventeenth century, let's say especially in the eighteenth century. Actually, the disci- plinary apparatuses (dispositifs) were not formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far from it, and they certainly did not replace overnight those apparatuses of sovereignty with which I tried to compare them. Disciplinary apparatuses come from far back; for a long time they were anchored and functioned in the midst of apparatuses of sovereignty; they were formed like islands where a type of power was exercised which was very different from what could be called the periods general morphology of sovereignty.
Where did these disciplinary apparatuses exist? It is not difficult to find them and follow their history. They are found basically in religious
? 64 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
communities, either regular communities, by which I mean statutory communities, recognized by the Church, or spontaneous communities. Now what I think is important is that throughout the Middle Ages, up to and including the sixteenth century, the disciplinary apparatuses we see in religious communities basically played a double role.
These disciplinary apparatuses were, of course, integrated within the general schema of feudal and monarchical sovereignty, and it is true that they functioned positively within this more general apparatus that enframed them, supported them, and at any rate absolutely tolerated them. But they also played a critical role of opposition and innovation. Very schematically, I think we can say that not only religious orders m the Church, but also religious practices, hierarchies, and ideology are transformed through the elaboration or reactivation of disciplinary apparatuses. I will take just one example.
The kind of reform, or rather series of reforms, that took place within the Benedictine order in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, basically represents an attempt to extract religious practice, or to extract the entire order, from the system of feudal sovereignty within which it was held and embedded. 1 Broadly speaking, we can say that the Cluniac form of monasticism had at that time been surrounded or even invaded by the feudal system, and the Cluny order, in its existence, economy, and internal hierarchies, was entirely an apparatus of sovereignty. 2 In what did the Citeaux reform consist? 3 The Cistercian reform restored a certain disci- pline to the order by reconstituting a disciplinary apparatus which was seen as referring back to a more original and forgotten rule; a disciplinary system in which we find the rule of poverty, the obligation of manual labor and the full use of time, the disappearance of personal possessions and extravagant expenditure, the regulation of eating and clothing, the rule of internal obedience, and the tightening up of the hierarchy. In short, you see all the characteristics of the disciplinary system appearing here as an effort to disengage the monastic order from the apparatus of sovereignty that had permeated it and eaten into it. Furthermore, it was precisely as a result of this reform, as a result of the rule of poverty, the hierarchical systems, the rules of obedience and work, and also the whole system of assessment and accounting linked to disciplinary practice, that the Citeaux order was able to make a number of economic innovations.
? It could be said that in the Middle Ages disciplinary systems played a critical and innovative role not only in the economic, but also in the political realm. For example, the new political powers trying to emerge through feudalism and on the basis of apparatuses of sovereignty, the new centralized powers of the monarchy on the one hand and the papacy on the other, try to provide themselves with instruments that are new with regard to the mechanisms of sovereignty, instruments of a disciplinary kind. In this way, the Dominican order, for example, with its discipline that is completely new with regard to the other reg ular monastic orders,"1 and the Benedictine order, were instruments in the hands of the papacy, and of the French monarchy, for breaking up certain elements of the feudal system, certain apparatuses of sovereignty, which existed, for example, in the Midi, in Occitanie, and elsewhere. 5 Later, in the sixteenth century, the Jesuits were used in the same way, as an instrument for breaking up certain residues of feudal society. 6 So, there was both economic and political innovation.
We can also say that these disciplinary investigations, these kinds of disciplinary islands we see emerging in medieval society, also made social innovations possible; at any rate, they made possible certain forms of social opposition to the hierarchies, to the system of differentiation of the apparatuses of sovereignty. In the Middle Ages, and much more on the eve of the Reformation, we see the constitution of relatively egalitarian communal groups which are not governed by the apparatus of sover- eignty but by the apparatus of discipline: a single rule imposed on everyone in the same way, there being no differences between those on whom it is applied other than those indicated by the internal hierarchy of the apparatus. Thus, very early on you see the appearance of phe- nomena like the mendicant monks, who already represent a kind of social opposition through a new disciplinary schema. 7 You also see reli- gious communities constituted by the laity, like the Brethren of the Common Life, who appear in Holland in the fourteenth century;8 and then, finally, all the working class or bourgeois communities that imme- diately preceded the Reformation and which, in new forms, continue up to the seventeenth century, in England for example, with their well- known political and social role; and equally in the eighteenth century.
We could also say that freemasonry was able to function in eighteenth
28 November 7973 65
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century French and European society as a sort of disciplinary innovation intended to work on the networks of systems of sovereignty from within, short circuit them, and, to a certain extent, break them up.
Very schematically, all of this amounts to saying that for a long time disciplinary apparatuses existed like islands in the general plasma of relations of sovereignty. Throughout the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth century, and still in the eighteenth century, these disciplinary systems remained marginal, whatever the uses to which they may have been put or the general effects they may have entailed. They remained on the side, but nevertheless it was through them that a series of innovations were sketched out which will gradually spread over the whole of society. And it is precisely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through a sort of progressive extension, a sort of general parasitic interference with society, that we see the constitution of what we could call, but very roughly and schematically, a "disciplinary society" replacing a society of sovereignty.
How did this extension of disciplinary apparatuses take place? In what stages? And, finally, what mechanism served as their support? I think we can say, again very schematically, that from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the historical extension, the overall parasitic invasion carried out by disciplinary apparatuses had a number of points of support.
First, there was a parasitic invasion of young students who, until the end ol the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, had main- tained their autonomy, their rules of movement and vagabondage, their unruliness, and also their links with popular unrest. Whether this was in the form of the Italian or the French system, whether in the form of a community of students and teachers together, or of an autonomous com- munity of students distinct from that of the teachers, is not important; there was anyway, within the general system of social functioning, a sort of group in movement, coming and going in a kind of emulsive state, a state of unrest. The disciplinanzation of this student youth, this colo- nization of youth, was one of the first points of application and exten- sion of the disciplinary system.
What is interesting is that the point of departure for the colonization of this unruly and mobile youth by the disciplinary system was the
? community of the Brethren of the Common Life, that is to say, a reli- gious community whose objective, whose ascetic ideal, was very clear, since its founder, someone called Groote, was closely linked to Ruysbroek the Admirable, and therefore well informed about the four- teenth century movement of German and Rhenish mysticism. 9 We lind the mould, the first model of the pedagogical colonization of youth, in this practice of the individuals exercise on himself, this attempt to transform the individual, this search for a progressive development of the individual up to the point of salvation, in this ascetic work of the individual on himself for his own salvation. On the basis of this, and in the collective form of this asceticism in the Brethren of the Common Life, we see the great schemas of pedagogy taking shape, that is to say, the idea that one can only learn things by passing through a number of obligatory and necessary stages, that these stages follow each other in time, and, in the same movement that distributes them in time, each stage represents progress. The twinning of time and progress is typical of ascetic exercise, and it will be equally typical of pedagogical practice.
As a result, in the schools founded by the Brethren ol the Common Life, first at Deventer, then at Liege and Strasbourg, for the first time there are divisions according to age and level, with programs of progres sive exercises. Second, something very new appears in this new pedagogy with regard to the rule of life for young people in the Middle Ages, that is to say, the rule of seclusion. Pedagogical exercise, just like ascetic exer- cise, will have to take place within a closed space, in an environment closed in on itself and with minimal relations with the outside world. Ascetic exercise required a special place; in the same way, pedagogical exercise will now demand its own place. Here again, what is new and essential is that the mixing and intrication of the university and the surrounding milieu, and in particular the link between university youth and the popular classes, which was so fundamental throughout the Middle Ages, will be severed by the transfer of this ascetic principle of cloistered life to pedagogy.
Third, one of the principles of ascetic exercise is that although it is an exercise of the individual on himself, it always takes place under the constant direction of someone who is the guide or the protector, at any rate, someone who takes responsibility for the steps of the person
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setting out on his own ascetic path. Ascetic progress requires a constant guide who keeps his eye on the progress, or setbacks and faults, of the person beginning the exercise. In the same way, and once again this is a complete innovation with regard to the university pedagogy of the Middle Ages, there is the idea that the teacher must follow the individ ual throughout his career, or, at least, that he must lead him from one stage to the other before passing him on to another, more learned guide, someone more advanced, who will be able to take the student further. The ascetic guide becomes the class teacher to whom the student is attached either for a course of studies, or lor a year, or possibly for the whole of his school life.
Finally, and I am not at all sure if the model for this is an ascetic one, but in any case, in the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life we find a very strange paramilitary type of organization. It is quite possible that this schema has a monastic origin. In fact, in monasteries, especially those of the ancient period, we find divisions into "decunes," each com- prising ten individuals under the direction of someone who is responsi- ble for them, and which are, at the same time, groupings for work, for meditation, and also for intellectual and spiritual training. 10 This schema, clearly inspired by the Roman army, may have been transposed into the monastic life of the first Christian centuries; in any case, we find it again in the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life that fol- low a rhythm based on this military schema of the decury. Maybe the organization of bourgeois militias in Flanders could have relayed this model in some way. Anyway, there is this very interesting schema, both monastic and military, which will be an instrument of the colonization of youth within pedagogical forms.
I think we can see all this as one of the first moments of the colonization of an entire society by means of disciplinary apparatuses.
We find another application of these disciplinary apparatuses in a different type of colonization; no longer that of youth, but quite simply of colonized peoples. And there is quite a strange history here. How disciplinary schemas were both applied and refined in the colonial
? populations should be examined in some detail. It seems that discipli- nanzation took place fairly unobtrusively and marginally to start with, and, interestingly, as a counterpoint to slavery.
In fact, it was the Jesuits in South America who opposed slavery for theological and religious reasons, as well as for economic reasons, and who countered the use of this probably immediate, brutal and, in terms of the consumption of human lives, extremely costly and poorly organized prac- tice of slavery, with a different type of distribution, control and [. . . *] exploitation by a disciplinary system. The famous, so-called "communist" Guarani republics in Paraguay were really disciplinary microcosms in which there was a hierarchical system to which the Jesuits held the keys; Guarani individuals and communities received an absolutely statutory schema ol behavior indicating their working hours, mealtimes, time allowed for rest, and the fixed time when they were woken up to make love and produce children. 11 It therefore involved the full employment of time.
Permanent supervision: everyone had their own dwelling in the vil- lages of these Guarani republics, however, there was a sort of walkway alongside these dwellings from which it was possible to look through the windows, which naturally had no shutters, so that what anyone was doing during the night could be supervised at any time. Above all, there was also a kind of mdividualization, at least at the level of the family micro-cell, since each one received a dwelling, which broke up the old Guarani community moreover, and it was precisely on this dwelling that the supervising eye was focused.
In short, it was a kind of permanent penal system, which was very lenient in comparison with the European penal system at the same time--that is to say, there was no death penalty, public execution or torture--but which was an absolutely permanent system of punishment that followed the individual throughout his life and which, at every moment, in each of his actions or his attitudes, was liable to pick out something indicating a bad tendency or inclination, and that conse- quently entailed a punishment which, on the one hand, could be lighter because it was constant, and, on the other, was only ever brought to bear on potential actions or the beginnings of action.
* (Recording:) human
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The third type ol colonization you see taking shape, alter that ol student youth and colonized peoples, was the internal colonization and confinement of vagrants, beggars, nomads, delinquents, prostitutes, etcetera, in the classical age. I will not return to this, because it has been studied a thousand times. Disciplinary apparatuses are installed in more or less all ol these cases, and we can see quite clearly that they derive directly from religious institutions. In a way, it was religious institutions, like the "Brethren of the Christian Doctrine," then fol lowed by the big teaching orders, like the Jesuits, which extended, by pseudopodia as it were, their own discipline over young people able to attend school. 12
It was also the religious orders, in this case the Jesuits again, who transposed and translormed their own discipline in colonial countries. As for the system ol confinement and the methods lor colonizing vagrants and nomads, etcetera, the forms were again very close to those ol religion, since in most cases it was the religious orders who had, if not the initiative for creating, at least the responsibility lor managing these establishments. It is therefore the external version ol religious disci plmes that we see being progressively applied in ever less marginal and ever more central sectors of the social system.
Then, at the end of the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth century, disciplinary apparatuses appear and are established which no longer have a religious basis, which are the transformation ol this, but out in the open as it were, without any regular support Irom the religious side. You see the appearance of disciplinary systems. There is, ol course, the army, with quartering to start with, which dates from the second hall of the eighteenth century, the struggle against deserters, that is to say, the use ol files and all the techniques ol individ- ual identification to prevent people from leaving the army as they entered it, and, finally, in the second half of the eighteenth century, physical exercises and the full use of time. u
After the army, it was quite simply the working class that began to receive disciplinary apparatuses. With the appearance of the big work shops in the eighteenth century, of the mining towns or big centers of metallurgy, to which a rural population had to be transported and was employed for the first time using completely new techniques, with the
? metallurgy of the Loire basin and the coalmines of the Massif Central and northern France, you see the appearance of disciplinary forms imposed on workers, with the first workers' cities, like that of Creusot. Then, in the same period, the great instrument of worker discipline, the employment document, the livret, is imposed on every worker. No worker can or has the right to move without a livret recording the name of his previous employer and the conditions under which and reasons why he left him; when he wants a new job or wants to live in a new town, he has to present his livret to his new boss and the municipality, the local authorities; it is the token, as it were, of all the disciplinary systems that bear down on him. 14
So, once again very schematically, these isolated, local, marginal disciplinary systems, which took shape in the Middle Ages, begin to cover all society through a sort of process that we could call external and internal colonization, in which you find again all the elements of the dis ciplinary systems I have been talking about. That is to say: fixing in space, optimum extraction of time, application and exploitation of the body's forces through the regulation of actions, postures and attention, constitution of constant supervision and an immediate punitive power, and, finally, organization of a regulatory power which is anonymous and non-individual in its operations, but which always ends up with an identification of subjected individualities. Broadly speaking, the singu- lar body is taken charge of by a power that trains it and constitutes it as an individual, that is to say, as a subjected body. Very schematically, this is what we can say regarding the history of disciplinary apparatuses. To what does this history correspond? What is there behind this kind of extension that is easily identified on the surface of events and institutions?
My impression is that the question behind this general deployment of disciplinary apparatuses involved what could be called the accumula- tion of men. That is to say, alongside and, what's more, necessary for the accumulation ol capital, there was an accumulation of men, or, if you like, a distribution of the labor force with all its somatic singularities. In what do the accumulation of men and the rational distribution of somatic singularities with the forces they carry consist?
First, they consist in bringing about the maximum possible use of individuals. They make all of them usable, not so that they can all be
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used in fact, but, precisely, so that they do not all have to be used; extending the labor market to the maximum in order to make certain of an unemployed reserve enabling wages to be lowered. As a result, making everyone usable.
Second, making individuals usable in their very multiplicity; ensuring that the force produced by the multiplicity of these individual forces of labor is at least equal to and, as far as possible, greater than the addition of these individual forces. How to distribute individuals so that as a group they are more than the pure and simple addition of these individuals set alongside each other?
Finally, to make possible the accumulation not only of these forces, but equally of time: the time of work, of apprenticeship, of improvement, of the acquisition of knowledge and aptitudes. This is the third aspect of the problem posed by the accumulation of men.
This triple function, this triple aspect of the techniques of the accu - mulation of men and of the forces of work, is, I think, the reason why the different disciplinary apparatuses were deployed, tried out, developed, and refined. The extension, movement, and migration of the disciplines from their lateral function to the central and general iunction they exercise from the eighteenth century are linked to this accumulation of men and to the role of the accumulation of men in capitalist society.
Considering things from a different angle, looking at it from the side of the history of the sciences, we could say that seventeenth and eighteenth century classical science responded to the empirical multi plicities of plants, animals, objects, values, and languages, with an operation of classification, with a taxonomic activity, which was, I think, the gen eral form of these empirical forms of knowledge throughout the classical age. 15 On the other hand, with the development of the capitalist econ omy, and so when the problem of the accumulation of men arose along- side and linked with the accumulation of capital, it became clear that a purely taxonomic and simple classificatory activity was no longer valid. To respond to these economic necessities men had to be distributed according to completely different techniques than those of classification. Rather than use taxonomic schemas to fit individuals into species and genus, something other than a taxonomy had to be used that I will call a tactic, although this also involved questions of distribution. Discipline
? is a tactic, that is to say, a certain way of distributing singularities according to a non-classificatory schema, a way of distributing them spatially, of making possible the most effective temporal accumulations at the level of productive activity
Okay, again very schematically, I think we could say that what gave birth to the sciences of man was precisely the irruption, the presence, or the insistence of these tactical problems posed by the need to distribute the forces of work in terms of the needs of the economy that was then developing. Distributing men in terms of these needs no longer entailed taxonomy, but a tactic, and the name of this tactic is "discipline. " The disciplines are techniques for the distribution of bodies, individuals, time, and forces of work. It was these disciplines, with precisely these tactics with the temporal vector they entail, which burst into Western knowledge in the course of the eighteenth century, and which relegated the old taxonomies, the old models for the empirical sciences, to the field of an outmoded and perhaps even entirely or partially abandoned knowledge. Tactics, and with it man, the problem of the body, the problem of time, etcetera, replaced taxonomy.