Francois Leuret develops his conceptions in "Memoire sur le traitement moral de la folie"
in Memoires de VAcademic royale de medecine, vol.
in Memoires de VAcademic royale de medecine, vol.
Foucault-Psychiatric-Power-1973-74
After this preface, a formal con- sultation was held, certain antidotes prescribed, and after a few weeks he perfectly recovered; a new plan of life and regimen were adopted, and he has ever since continued to enjoy mens sana in corpore sano.
"2/'
In a case history like this, you see finally how a psychiatric practice functioned. Basically, starting from the delirious idea, it involved developing a sort of labyrinth exactly patterned on the delirium itsell, homogeneous with the erroneous idea, through which the patient is taken. The patient believes, for example, that his servant gives him shirts poisoned with sulfur which irritate his skin. Okay, we pursue the delirium. His shirts are examined by an expert, which naturally produces a positive result. Since we have a positive result, the case is submitted to a court: the proofs are submitted and a judgment, a condemnation, is pronounced, and we pretend to send the servant to prison.
There is, then, the organization of a labyrinth homogeneous with the delirious idea, and a sort of forked outcome is placed at the end of this labyrinth, an outcome at two levels, which, precisely, will bring about the cure. On the one hand, there will be an event produced within the delirium. That is to say, at the level of the patient's delirium, the impris- onment of the guilty party confirms the truth of the delirium, but, at the same time, assures the patient that he has been freed from what, within his delirium, was the cause of his illness. There is then this first result, at the level of the delirium itself, authenticating the delirium and getting rid of what it is that functions as cause within the delirium.
Now, at a different level, that is to say at the level of the doctors, of those around the patient, something very different happens. By pre- tending to imprison the servant, she is put out of play, she is separated from the patient, and the patient thus finds himself sheltered from what, in reality, was the cause of his illness, that is to say his mistrust and hatred of her. So that which is the cause within, and the cause of, his delirium are short-circuited in one and the same operation.
This operation had to be one and the same; that is to say, it had to take place at the end of the labyrinth of the delirium, because for the doctors it was quite clear that if the servant was purely and simply dismissed, without being dismissed as the cause within the delirium,
? then the delirium could have begun again. The patient would imagine that she was still pursuing him, that she had found a way o( getting round them, or he would redirect mistrust ot his servant on to someone else. From the moment that one effectuates the delirium, that one accords it reality, authenticates it and, at the same time, suppresses the cause within it, one has the conditions for the liquidation ol the delirium itself. * And if the conditions for liquidating the delirium are at the same time the suppression of what caused the delirium itsell, then the cure is assured as a result. So, it you like, there is both suppression ol the cause of delirium, and suppression of the cause within the delirium. And it is this kind ol fork, arrived at through the labyrinth ol fictional venlication, that assures the very principle of the cure.
Now--and this is the third moment--when the patient really believes that his delirium was the truth, when the patient believes that what, within his delirium, was the cause of his illness has been suppressed, then he discovers as a result the possibility of accepting medical intervention. On the pretext ol curing him of the illness inflicted on him by the servant, one slips into this kind of opening a medication that is medication within the delirium, a medication that within the delirium will enable him to escape the illness caused by the servant, and which is a medication for the dehr mm since he is actually given medicine that, by calming his humors, by calming his blood, by discharging all the congestions of his blood system, etcetera, ensures the cure. And again you can see that an element of reality, the medicine, functions at two levels: as medication within the delirium and as therapy for the delirium. It is this kind of organized game around the fictional verification of the delirium that effectively ensures the cure.
Okay, this game of truth, within delirium and of delirium, will be completely suppressed in the psychiatric practice that commences at the start of the nineteenth century. It seems to me that the emergence of what we can call a disciplinary practice, this new microphysics of power, will sweep all this away and establish the core elements of all the psychiatric scenes that develop subsequently, and on the basis of which psychiatric theory and the psychiatric institution will be built.
* The manuscript adds: "One really suppresses that which functions as the cause within the delirium, but it is suppressed in a form that the delirium can accept. "
Ui November 1973 35
? 36 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
1. "Philippe Pinel freeing the mad from their chains at Bicetre"--where, appointed on
6 August 1793, he took up his post as "infirmary doctor" on 11 September 1793--is the version given by his eldest son, Scipion Pinel (1795-1859), referring the event to 1792, in an apocryphal article attributed to his father: "Sur Pabolilion des chaines des alienes, par Philippe Pinel, membre d l'Institut. Note extraite de ses cahiers, communiques par M. Pinel fils" Archives de medicine, 1st year, vol. 2, May 1823, pp. 15 17; and communication to the Academy of Medicine: "Bicetre en 1792. De l'abolition des chaines" Memoires de I'Academie de medecine, no. 5, 1856, pp. 32-40. In 1849 the painter Charles Muller immor talized him in a painting entitled Pinel removes the chains from the mad of Bicetre. Foucault refers to this in Histoire de la folie, Part 3, ch. 4, pp. 483 484 and 496 501; Madness and Civilisation, ch. 9, pp. 241 243 (pages 484-501 of the French edition are omitted from the English translation).
2. P. Pinel, Traite medico-philosophique sur Valienation mentale, ou la Manie, section V: "Police interieure et surveillance a etablir dans les hospices d'alienation: ? vii, Les maniaques, durant leurs acces doivent ils etre condamnes a unc reclusion elroite? " pp. 192 193;
A Treatise on Insanity, "The importance of an enlightened system of police for the internal management ol lunatic asylums: Is close confinement requisite in all cases and throughout the whole term of acute mania? " pp. 187 188. George III (1738 1820), King of Great Britain and Ireland, had several episodes of mental disturbance in 1765, 1788 1789, lrom February to July 1810, and from October 1810 until his death on 29 January 1820. See
I. Macalpine and R. Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business (New York: Pantheon Books,
1969).
3. Sir Francis Willis (1718-1807), the proprietor ol an establishment in Lincolnshire for
people suffering irom mental disorders, was called to London on 5 December 1788 within the framework of a commission created by Parliament in order to pronounce on the King's condition. Willis looked alter George III until the remission of his disorder in March 1789. The episode referred to by Pinel is in "Observations sur le regime moral que est le plus propre a retablir, dans certains cas, la raison egaree des monarques" pp. 1} 15, reproduced
in J. Postel, Genese de la psychiatric Les premiers ecrits de Philippe Pinel (Le Plessis Robinson, Institut Synthelabo, 1998) pp. 194-197, and Traite medico-philosophique, pp. 192-193; A Treatise on Insanity, pp. 187 188, and pp. 286-290 in which Pinel quotes the Reportfrom the Committee Appointed to Examine the Physicians who Have Attended His Majesty during his Illness, touching the Present State of His Majesty's Health (London: 1789) [This latter section, entitled "Exemple memorable d'une discussion sur la manie, devenue une affaire d'etat," is omitted from the English translation; G. B. ]
4. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, written at the end of 1592 and the beginning of 1593, describes the accession to the throne, by usurpation, of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the brother ol King Edward IV, and then his death at the Battle of Bosworth.
5. The Tragedy of King Lear (performed at Court on 26 December 1606, first published in 1608, and then in a revised version in 1623). Foucault refers to King Lear in Histoire de la folie, p. 49; Madness and Civilisation, p. 31, and also refers to the work of A. Adnes,
6. 7. 8. 9-
Shakespeare et la folie. Etude medico-psychologique (Paris: Maloine, 1935) [the reference to Adnes is omitted from the English translation; G. B. ]. He returns to it in the Course at the College de France of 1983 1984, "Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Le courage de
la verite," lecture of 21 March 1984.
P. Pinel, Traite medico-philosophique, p. 192; A Treatise on Insanity, p. 188.
Ibid. p. 193; ibid. p. 188.
Ibid. ;ibid.
On 6 January 1838, the Minister of the Interior, Adrien de Gasparin, presented to the Chamber of Deputies a draft law on the insane, which was voted on by the Chamber of Peers on 22 March, and on 14 June by the Chamber of Deputies. It was promulgated on 30 June 1838. See, R. Castel, L'Ordre psychiatrique. Vage d'or de Valienisme (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1976) pp. 316-324; English translation, The Regulation of Madness, the origins of incarceration in France, trans. W. D. Halls (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) pp. 243-253.
? 10. P. Pinel, Traite medko-philosophique, p. 193; A Treatise on Insanity, p. 188.
11. Foucault is alluding here to Descartes evoking those "madmen, whose brains are so dam
aged by the persistent vapours of melancholia that they {irmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are (. . . ) made oi glass" Meditations touchanl la premiere philosophic (1641), trans, due de Luynes, 1647, "First meditation: Some things that one can put in doubt" in CEuvres et Lettres, A. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) p. 268; English translation, "Meditations on First Philosophy" trans. John Cottingham, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothofi, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) vol. 2, p. 13. See M. Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu" in Dits et Ecrits, 1954-1988, four volumes, ed. D. Delert and F. Ewald, with the collaboration ofj. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 245-268; English translation, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire" trans. Geofl Bennington, in M. Foucault, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-19&4, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1998)
j hereafter, Essential Works oj Foucault, 2 j.
12. E. J. Georget, De la folk. Considerations sur cette maladk, p. 282: "Nothing in the world can
persuade them otherwise. You tell ( . . . ) a supposed king that he is not a king and he will
reply with insults. "
13. J. Haslam, Observations on Insanity, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, and
Considerations on the Moral Management of Insane Persons.
14. P. Pinel, Traite medko-philosophique. The manuscript refers to cases that ligure in section II,
? vii, pp. 58 59; ? xxiii, pp. 96 97; and section V, ? 3, pp. 181-183, and ? 9, pp. 196 197;
A Treatise on Insanity, pp. 60-61; pp. 103 106; pp. 178 179; pp. 191 193.
15. J. E. D. Esquirol, Des maladies menlales; Mental Maladies.
16. F. E. Fodere, Traite du delire, and, Essai medico-legal sur les diverses especes dejolk vrak, simulee
et raisonnee, sur les causes el les moyens de les distinguer, sur leurs effets excusant ou atlenuant devant les tribunaux, et sur leur association avec les penchants au crime et pluskurs maladies physiques et morales (Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1832).
17. E. J. Georget, De la folk, and, De la physiologic du sysleme nerveux et specialement du cerveau. Rechcrches sur les maladies nerveuses en general, et en particulier sur le siege, la nature et le traitement de I'hysterk, de Vhypocondrie, de I'epilepsie et de I'aslhmc convulsij, 2 volumes ( P a n s :
J. B. Bailliere, 1821).
18. Joseph Guislain (1797 i860), Traite sur {'alienation mentale et sur les hospices des alienes, 2 volumes
(Amsterdam: Van der Hey and Gartman, 1826), and, Traite sur les phrenopathks ou Doctrine naturelle nouvelle des maladies menlales, basee sur des observations pratiques el stalistiques, et I'elude des causes, de la nature des symptomes, du pronostic, du diagnostic et du traitement de ces affections (Brussels: Etablissement Encyclographique, 1833).
19- P. Pinel, Traite medko-philosophique, section II, ? vii, pp. 58 59; A Treatise on Insanity, pp. 60-61.
20. Ibid. ? xxiii, pp. 96 97n; ibid. p. 100n.
21. Ibid, section V, ? iii, pp. 181 183; ibid. pp. 178 179.
22.
Francois Leuret develops his conceptions in "Memoire sur le traitement moral de la folie"
in Memoires de VAcademic royale de medecine, vol. 7 (Paris: 1838) pp. 552 276; Du traitement moral de la folk', "Memoire sur la revulsion morale dans la traitement de la folie" in Memoires de I Academic royale de medecine, vol. 9 (Paris: 1841) pp. 655 671; and Des indications a suivre dans le traitement moral de lajolie (Paris: Le Normant, 1846).
23. WTien she was 42 years old, Mary Barnes, a nurse, entered the reception center ol Kmgsley Hall, which opened in 1965 for staff suffering from mental problems, before closing on 31 May 1970. She spent five years there and her history is known to us through the work she wrote with her therapist: M. Barnes and J. Berke, Mary Barnes. Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1971) pp. 248-249; French translation, Mary Barnes. Un voyage autour de lafolk, trans. M. Davidovici (Paris: Le Seuil, 1973) pp. 287 288.
24. Joseph Mason Cox (1763 1818), Practical Observations on Insanity (London: Baldwin and Murray, 1806), Case IV, pp. 535; French translation, Observations sur la demence, trans. L. Odier (Geneva: Bibliotheque Britannique, 1806) pp. 80-81. [It has not been possible to consult a copy of the 1st 1804 edition of Mason Cox on which the 1806 French translation is based. English page references are to the 2nd, 1806 edition; G. B. ]
7// November 1973 37
? thi&ee
21 NOVEMBER 1973
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. " The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. rKJ Forms of disciplinary power: army, police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. r^J Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and
constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
WE CAN SAY THAT between 1850 and 1930 classical psychiatry reigned and functioned without too many external problems on the basis of what it considered to be, and put to work as, a true discourse. At any rate, from this discourse it deduced the need for the asylum insti- tution as well as the need to deploy a medical power as an internal and effective law within this institution. In short, it deduced the need for an institution and a power from a supposedly true discourse.
It seems to me that we can say that criticism of the institution--I hesitate to say "antipsychiatry"--let's say a certain form of criticism which developed from around 1930 to 1940,1 did not start from a supposedly true psychiatric discourse in order to deduce the need for an institution and a medical power, but rather from the fact of the institution and its func- tioning, and from criticism of the institution that sought to bring to light, on the one hand, the violence of the medical power exercised within it, and, on the other, the effects of incomprehension that right from the start dis torted the supposed truth of this medical discourse. So, if you like, this form of analysis started from the institution in order to denounce power and analyse effects of incomprehension.
? 40 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
What I would like to do instead is try to bring this problem of power to the fore, which is why I have begun the lectures in the way I have. I will leave the relationships between this analysis of power and the problem of the truth of a discourse on madness until a bit later. 2
I started then with this scene of George III confronted by his servants who were, at the same time, agents of medical power, because it seemed to me a fine example of the confrontation between a power, which, in the person of the king himself, is sovereign power embodied in this mad king, and another type of power, which is instead anonymous and silent, and which, paradoxically, gets support from the servants' strength, from a muscular, obedient force not articulated in discourse. So, on the one hand, there is the king's furious outburst and, facing this, the controlled force of the servants. And the therapeutic process presupposed by Willis and, after him, Pinel, consisted in getting madness to migrate from a sovereignty it drove wild and within which it exploded, to a discipline supposed to subjugate it. What appears in this capture of madness, prior to any institution and outside any discourse of truth, was therefore a power that I call "disciplinary power. "
What is this power? I would like to advance the hypothesis that something like disciplinary power exists in our society. By this I mean no more than a particular, as it were, terminal, capillary form of power; a final relay, a particular modality by which political power, power in gen- eral, finally reaches the level of bodies and gets a hold on them, taking actions, behavior, habits, and words into account; the way in which power converges below to affect individual bodies themselves, to work on, mod- ify, and direct what Servan called "the soft fibers of the brain. "3 In other words, I think that in our society disciplinary power is a quite specific modality of what could be called the synaptic contact of bodies-power. *
The second hypothesis is that disciplinary power, in its specificity, has a history; it is not born suddenly, has not always existed, and is formed and follows a diagonal trajectory, as it were, through Western society. If we take only the history going from the Middle Ages until our own time, I think we can say that the formation of this power, in its
* The manuscript adds: "Methodologically this entails leaving the problem of the State, of the State apparatus, to one side and dispensing with the psycho-sociological notion of authority. "
? specific characteristics, was not completely marginal to medieval society, but it was certainly not central either. It was formed within religious communities from where, being transformed in the process, it was taken into the lay communities that developed and multiplied in the pre- Reformation period, let's say in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Wt can see this transfer to communities like the famous "Brothers of the Common Life," which are not exactly monastic but which, on the basis of techniques taken from monastic life, as well as ascetic exercises taken from a whole tradition of religious exercises, defined disciplinary meth- ods for daily life and pedagogy/1 This is just one example of the spread of monastic or ascetic disciplines before the Reformation. We then see these techniques gradually spreading far afield, penetrating sixteenth, and especially seventeenth and eighteenth century society, and, in the nineteenth century, becoming the major general form of this synaptic contact: political power-individual body.
To take a somewhat symbolic reference point, I think this evolution, which goes from the Brethren of the Common Life, that is to say from the fourteenth century, to its point of explosion, that is to say, when discipli- nary power becomes an absolutely generalized social form, ends up, in 1791, with Bentham's Panopticon, which provides the most general political and technical formula of disciplinary power. 5 I think the confrontation between George III and his servants--which is more or less contemporaneous with the Panopticon--this confrontation of the king's madness and medical disci- pline is one of the historical and symbolic points of the emergence and definitive installation of disciplinary power in society. Now I do not think that we can analyze how psychiatry functions by restricting ourselves to the workings of the asylum institution. Obviously there's no question of analyzing how psychiatry functions starting from its supposedly true discourse; but nor do I think we can understand how it functions by ana lyzmg the institution. The mechanism of psychiatry should be understood starting from the way in which disciplinary power works.
So, what is this disciplinary power? This is what I would like to talk about this evening.
21 November 1973 41
? 42 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
It is not very easy to study it. First of all, because I will take a fairly broad time scale; I will take examples from disciplinary forms that appear in the sixteenth century and develop up until the eighteenth century. It is not easy because, in order to study this disciplinary power, this meeting point of the body and power, it must be analyzed in contrast with another type of power, which preceded it and which will be juxtaposed to it. This is what I will begin to do, without being very certain, moreover, ol what I will say.
It seems to me that we could oppose disciplinary power to a power that preceded it historically and with which it was entangled for a long time before finally prevailing in turn. I will call this earlier form of power, in opposition then to disciplinary power, the power of sovereignty, but with out being exactly happy with this word lor reasons you will soon see.
*
What is the power of sovereignty? It seems to me to be a power relationship that links sovereign and subject according to a couple of asymmetrical relationships: a levy or deduction one side, and expendi ture on the other. In the relationship ol sovereignty, the sovereign imposes a levy on products, harvests, manufactured objects, arms, the labor force, and courage. In a symmetrical reverse process, at the same time as he imposes a levy on services, there will be, not repayment for what he has deducted, for the sovereign does not have to pay back, but the sovereign's expenditure, which may take the form of the gift, which may be made during ritual ceremonies, such as gifts for happy events, like a birth, or gifts of service, such as the service of protection or the religious service ensured by the Church, for example, very different from the kind of service he has levied. It may also be the outlay of expenditure when, for festivals, for the organization of a war, the lord makes those around him work in return for payment. So this system of levy expenditure seems to me to be typical of this sovereign type of power. Of course, deductions always largely exceed expenditure, and the dissymmetry is so great that, behind this relationship of sovereignty and this dissymmetrical coupling of levy-expenditure, we can see quite clearly the emergence of plunder, pillage, and war.
? Second, I think the relationship ol sovereignty always bears the mark of a founding precedence. For there to be a relationship of sovereignty there must be something like divine right, or conquest, a victory, an act of submission, an oath of loyalty, an act passed between the sovereign who grants privileges, aid, protection, and so lorth, and someone who, in return, pledges himself; or there must be something like birth, the rights of blood. In short, we can say that the relationship oi sovereignty always looks back to something that constituted its definitive founda- tion. But this does not mean that this relationship of sovereignty does not have to be regularly or irregularly reactualized; a characteristic fea- ture o( the relationship of sovereignty is that is always reactualized by things like ceremonies and rituals, by narratives also, and by gestures, distinguishing signs, required forms of greeting, marks ol respect, insignia, coats of arms, and suchlike. That the relationship ol sovereignty is thus founded on precedence and reactualized by a number of more or less ritual actions stems Irom the tact that the relationship is, in a sense, intangible, that it is given once and tor all but, at the same time, is Iragile and always liable to disuse or breakdown. For the relationship of sovereignty to really hold, outside of the rite of recommencement and reactuahzation, outside ol the game ol ritual signs, there is always the need for a certain supplement or threat of violence, which is there behind the relationship of sovereignty, and which sustains it and ensures that it holds. The other side of sovereignty is violence, it is war.
The third feature ol relationships of sovereignty is that they are not iso topic. By this I mean that they are intertwined and tangled up with each other in such a way that we cannot establish a system of exhaustive and planned hierarchy between them. In other words, relationships of sover- eignty are indeed perpetual relationships of differentiation, but they are not relationships of classification; they do not constitute a unitary hierar- chical table with subordinate and superordinate elements. Not being iso- topic means first of all that they are heterogeneous and have no common measure. There is, for example, the relationship of sovereignty between serf and lord, and a different relationship of sovereignty, which absolutely cannot be superimposed on this, between the holder of a fief and a suzerain, and there is the relationship of sovereignty exercised by the priest with regard to the laity, and all these relationships cannot be
21 November 1973 43
? 44 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
integrated withm a genuinely single system. Furthermore--this again marks the non-isotopic nature of the relationship of sovereignty--the elements it involves, that it puts into play, are not equivalents: a relation ship of sovereignty may perfectly well concern the relationship between a sovereign or a suzerain--I do not distinguish them in an analysis as schematic as this--and a family, a community, or the inhabitants of a parish or a region; but sovereignty may also bear on something other than these human multiplicities. Sovereignty may bear on land, a road, an instrument of production--a mill, for example--and on users: those who pass through a tollgate, along a road, fall under the relationship of sovereignty.
So you can see that the relationship of sovereignty is a relationship in which the subject element is not so much, and we can even say it is almost never, an individual, an individual body. The relationship of sovereignty applies not to a somatic singularity but to multiplicities--like lamilies, users--which in a way are situated above physical individuality, or, on the contrary, it applies to fragments or aspects of individuality, of somatic singularity. It is insofar as one is the son ot X, a bourgeois of this town, etcetera, that one will be held in a relationship of sovereignty, that one will be sovereign or, alternatively, subject, and one may be both subject and sovereign in different aspects, so that these relationships can never be wholly plotted and laid out according to the terms of a single table.
In other words, in a relationship of sovereignty, what I call the subject-function moves around and circulates above and below somatic singularities, and, conversely, bodies circulate, move around, rest on something here, and take flight. In these relationships of sovereignty there is therefore a never ending game of movements and disputes in which subject-functions and somatic singularities, let's say--with a word I am not very happy with for reasons you will soon see--individuals, are moved around in relation to each other. The pinning of the subject function to a definite body can only take place at times in a discontinu ous, incidental fashion, in ceremonies for example. It takes place when the individual's body is marked by an insignia, by the gesture he makes: in homage, for example, when a somatic singularity is effectively marked with the seal of the sovereignty that accepts it. Or it takes place in the violence with which sovereignty asserts its rights and forcibly imposes them on someone it subjects. So, at the actual level at which the
? relationship of sovereignty is applied, at the lower extremity of the rela- tionship, if you like, you never find a perfect fit between sovereignty and corporeal singularities.
On the other hand, if you look towards the summit you will see there the individualization absent at the base; you begin to see it sketched out towards the top. There is a sort of underlying individualization of the relationship of sovereignty towards the top, that is to say, towards the sovereign. The power of sovereignty necessarily entails a sort of monar chical spiral. That is to say, precisely insofar as the power of sovereignty is not isotopic but entails never ending disputes and movements, to the extent that plunder, pillage, and war still rumble behind these sovereign relationships, and the individual as such is never caught in the relation ship, then, at a given moment and coming from above, there must be something that ensures arbitration: there must be a single, individual point which is the summit of this set of heterotopic relationships that absolutely cannot be plotted on one and the same table.
The sovereign's individuality is entailed by the non-individualization of the elements on which the relationship of sovereignty is applied. Consequently there is the need for something like a sovereign who, in his own body, is the point on which all these multiple, different, and irreconcilable relationships converge. Thus, at the summit of this type of power, there is necessarily something like the king in his individuality, with his king's body. But straightaway you see a very odd phenomenon, which has been studied by Kantorowicz in his book The King's Two Bodies:6 in order to ensure his sovereignty, the king really must be an individual with a body, but this body must not die along with the king's somatic singularity. The monarchy must remain when the monarch no longer exists; the king's body, which holds together all these relation- ships of sovereignty, must not disappear with the death of this individ- ual X or Y. The king's body, therefore, must have a kind of permanence; more than just his somatic singularity, it must be the solidity of his realm, of his crown. So that the individualization we see outlined at the summit of the relationship of sovereignty entails the multiplication of the king's body. The king's body is at least double according to Kantorowicz, and on closer examination, starting from a certain period at least, it is probably an absolutely multiple body.
27 November 1973 45
? 46 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
So I think we can say that the relationship of sovereignty does put some- thing like political power in contact with the body, applies it to the body, but that it never reveals individuality/ It is a form oi power without an individualizing function, or which only outlines individuality on the sov ereign's side, and again, at the cost of this curious, paradoxical, and mytho logical multiplication of bodies. We have bodies without any individuality on one side, and individuality but a multiplicity of bodies on the other.
Okay, now for disciplinary power, since this is what I particularly want to talk about.
I think we could contrast it almost term for term with sovereignty. First ol all, disciplinary power does not make use of this mechanism, this asym metrical coupling of levy expenditure. In a disciplinary apparatus there is no dualism, no asymmetry; there is not this kind of fragmented hold. It seems to me that disciplinary power can be characterized first of all by the (act that it does not involve imposing a levy on the product or on a part of time, or on this or that category of service, but that it is a total hold, or, at any rate, tends to be an exhaustive capture of the individual's body, actions, time, and behavior. It is a seizure of the body, and not of the prod uct; it is a seizure of time in its totality, and not of the time of service.
We have a very clear example of this in the appearance of military dis cipline at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the course ol the eighteenth century. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, roughly until the Thirty Years War, military discipline did not exist; what existed was a never-ending transition from vagabondage to the army. That is to say, the army was always constituted by a group of people recruited for a finite time for the needs of the cause, and to whom food and lodging were assured through pillage and the occupation of any premises found on the spot. In other words, in this system, which was still part of the order of sovereignty, a certain amount of time was deducted from people's lives, some of their resources were deducted by the requirement that they bring their arms, and they were promised something like the reward of pillage.
* The manuscript clarifies: "The subject pole never coincides continually with the somatic singularity, except in the ritual of branding. "
? From the middle of the seventeenth century you see something like the disciplinary system appearing in the army; that is to say an army lodged in barracks and in which the soldiers are engaged. That is to say, they are engaged for the whole day for the duration of the campaign, and, apart from demobilizations, they are equally engaged during peace- time, because, from 1750 or 1760, when his life of soldiering comes to an end, the soldier receives a pension and becomes a retired soldier. Military discipline begins to be the general confiscation of the body, time, and life; it is no longer a levy on the individual's activity but an occupation of his body, life, and time. Every disciplinary system tends, I think, to be an occupation of the individual's time, Hie, and body. 7
Second, the disciplinary system does not need this discontinuous, ritual, more or less cyclical game of ceremonies and marks in order to Junction. Disciplinary power is not discontinuous but involves a procedure of con- tinuous control instead. In the disciplinary system, one is not available for someone's possible use, one is perpetually under someone's gaze, or, at any rate, in the situation of being observed. One is not then marked by an action made once and for all, or by a situation given from the start, but vis ible and always in the situation of being under constant observation. More precisely, we can say that there is no reference to an act, an event, or an orig- inal right in the relationship of disciplinary power. Disciplinary power refers instead to a final or optimum state. It looks forward to the future, towards the moment when it will keep going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be required, when discipline, consequently, will have become habit. There is a genetic polarization, a temporal gradient in disci pline, exactly the opposite of the reference to precedence that is necessarily involved in relationships of sovereignty. All discipline entails this kind of genetic course by which, from a point, which is not given as the inescapable situation, but as the zero point of the start of discipline, something must develop such that discipline will keep going by itself. What is it, then, that ensures this permanent functioning of discipline, this kind of genetic con-
tinuity typical of disciplinary power? It is obviously not the ritual or cycli- cal ceremony, but exercise; progressive, graduated exercise will mark out the growth and improvement of discipline on a temporal scale.
Here again we can take the army as our example. In the army as it existed in the form I call the power of sovereignty, there was certainly
27 November 1973 M
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something that could be called exercises, but actually its function was not at all that of disciplinary exercise: there were things like jousts and games. That is to say, warriors, those at least who were warriors by status--nobles and knights--regularly practiced jousting and suchlike. We could interpret this as a sort exercise, as a training of the body, in a sense, but I think it was essentially a kind of repetition of bravery, a test by which the individual displayed that he was in a permanent state of readiness to assert his status as a knight and so do honor to the situa tion in which he exercised certain rights and obtained certain privileges. The joust was perhaps a kind of exercise, but I think it was above all the cyclical repetition of the great test by which a knight became a knight.
On the other hand, from the eighteenth century, especially with Frederick II and the Prussian army, you see the appearance of physical exercise in the army, something that hardly existed before. In the army of Frederick II, and in western armies at the end of eighteenth century, this physical exercise does not consist in things like jousting, that is to say, the repetition and reproduction of the actions of war. Physical exer- cise is a training of the body; it is the training of skill, marching, resis- tance, and elementary movements in accordance with a graduated scale, completely different from the cyclical repetition of jousts and games. So what I think is typical of discipline is not ceremony, but exercise as the means for assuring this [sort] of genetic continuity. 8
I think discipline necessarily resorts to writing as an instrument of this control, of the permanent and overall taking charge of the individual's body. That is to say, whereas the relation of sovereignty entails the actualization of the distinctive mark, I think we could say that discipline, with its require- ment of complete visibility, its constitution of genetic paths, this kind of typical hierarchical continuum, necessarily calls on writing. This is first of all to ensure that everything that happens, everything the individual does and says, is graded and recorded, and then to transmit this information from below up through the hierarchical levels, and then, finally, to make this information accessible and thereby assure the principle of omnivisibility, which is, I think, the second major characteristic of discipline.
It seems to me that the use of writing is absolutely necessary for dis- ciplinary power to be total and continuous, and I think we could study the way in which, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the
? army as in schools, in centers of apprenticeship as in the police or judicial system, people's bodies, behavior, and discourse are gradually besieged by a tissue of writing, by a sort of graphic plasma which records them, codifies them, and passes them up through the hierarchy to a centralized p o i n t / I think this direct and continuous relationship of writing to the body is new. The visibility of the body and the perma- nence of writing go together, and obviously their effect is what could be called schematic and centralized individualization.
I will take just two examples of this game of writing in discipline. The first is in the schools of apprenticeship that are formed in the sec ond half of the seventeenth century and multiply during the eighteenth century. Consider corporative apprenticeship in the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth and still in the seventeenth centuries. For a fee, an apprentice joined a master whose only obligation, in return for this sum of money, was to pass on the whole of his learning to the apprentice. In return the apprentice had to provide the master with any services the latter demanded. There was an exchange, then, of daily service for the major service of the transmission of knowledge. At the end of the apprentice- ship, there was only a form of checking, the masterpiece, which was sub- mitted to the jurande, that is to say a jury of the responsible individuals of the town's corporation or professional body.
Now a completely new type of institution appears in the second half of the seventeenth century. As an example of this, I will take the Gobelins' professional school of design and tapestry, which was orga- nized in 1667 and gradually improved up until an important regulation of 1737. 9 Apprenticeship takes place here in a completely different way. That is to say, the students are first of all divided up according to age, and a certain type of work is given to each age block. This work must be done in the presence either of teachers or supervisors, and it must be assessed at the same time and together with assessment of the student's behavior, assiduity, and zeal while performing his work. These assess- ments are entered on registers which are kept and passed on up the hier- archy to the director of the Gobelins' manufacture himself, and, on this
* The manuscripts says: "Bodies, actions, behaviors, and discourses are gradually besieged by a tissue of writing, a graphic plasma, which records them, codifies them, and schematizes them. "
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basis, a succinct report is sent to the minister of the King's Household concerning the quality of the work, the student's abilities, and whether he can now be considered a master. A whole network of writing is con- stituted around the apprentice's behavior, and this will first codify all his behavior in terms of a number of assessments determined in advance, then schematize it, and finally convey it to a point of centralization which will define his ability or inability There is, then, an investment by writing, codification, transfer, and centralization, in short, the constitution of a schematic and centralized individuality
We could say the same thing about the police discipline established in most European countries, and especially in France, in the second half of the eighteenth century. Police practice in the area of writing was still very simple in the second half of the seventeenth century: when an infraction was committed that was not a court matter, the lieutenant of the police (or his deputies) took charge and made a decision, which was simply notified. And then, in the course of the eighteenth century, gradually you see the individual beginning to be completely besieged by writing. That is to say, you see the appearance of visits to maisons d'internement to check up on the individual: why was he arrested, when was he arrested, how has he conducted himself since, has he made progress, and so on? The system is refined and in the second half of the eighteenth century you see the constitution of files for those who have simply come to the notice of the police, or whom the police suspect of something. Around the 1760s, I think, the police are required to make two copies of reports on those they suspect--reports which must be kept up to date, of course--one remaining on the spot, enabling a check to be made on the individual where he lives, and a copy sent to Paris, which is centralized at the min istry and redistributed to the other regions falling under different lieu- tenants of police, so that the individual can be immediately identified if he moves. Biographies are constituted in this way, or, in actual fact, police individualities based on the techniques of what I will call perpetual investment by writing. This administrative and centralized individuality is constituted in 1826 when a way is found to apply the cataloguing tech- niques already in use in libraries and botanical gardens. 10
Finally, the continuous and endless visibility assured by writing has an important effect: the extreme promptness of the reaction of disciplinary
? power that this perpetual visibility in the disciplinary system made possible. Unlike sovereign power--which only intervenes violently, from time to time, and in the form of war, exemplary punishment, or ceremony--disciplinary power will be able to intervene without halt from the first moment, the first action, the first hint. Disciplinary power has an inherent tendency to intervene at the same level as what is happening, at the point when the virtual is becoming real; disciplinary power always tends to intervene beforehand, before the act itself if possible, and by means of an infra judicial interplay of supervision, rewards, punishments, and pressure.
If we can say that the other side of sovereignty was war, I think we can say that the other side of the disciplinary relationship is punishment, both miniscule and continuous punitive pressure.
Here again, we could take an example of this from work discipline, from discipline in the workshop. In workers' contracts which were signed, and this was sometimes the case very early on, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the worker typically had to end his work before a given time, or he had to give so many days work to his patron. It he did not finish the work or provide the full number of days, then he had to give either the equivalent of what was lacking, or add on a certain quan tity of work or money as amends. So there was, if you like, a punitive system that hung on, worked on and starting from what had actually been done, as either damage or fault.
On the other hand, from the eighteenth century you see the birth ol a subtle system of workshop discipline that focuses on potential behavior. In the workshop regulations distributed at this time you see a compar- ative supervision of workers, their lateness and absences noted down to the last minute; you also see the punishment of anything that might involve distraction. For example, a Gobelins regulation of 1680 notes that even hymns sung while working must be sung quietly so as not to disturb one's fellow workers. 11 There are regulations against telling bawdy stories when returning from lunch or dinner, because this dis tracts the workers who will then lack the calmness of mind required for work. So, there is a continuous pressure of this disciplinary power, which is not brought to bear on an offense or damage but on potential behavior. One must be able to spot an action even before it has been
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performed, and disciplinary power must intervene somehow before the actual manifestation of the behavior, before the body, the action, or the discourse, at the level of what is potential, disposition, will, at the level of the soul. In this way something, the soul, is projected behind disci- plinary power, but it is a very different soul from the one defined by Christian practice and theory.
In a case history like this, you see finally how a psychiatric practice functioned. Basically, starting from the delirious idea, it involved developing a sort of labyrinth exactly patterned on the delirium itsell, homogeneous with the erroneous idea, through which the patient is taken. The patient believes, for example, that his servant gives him shirts poisoned with sulfur which irritate his skin. Okay, we pursue the delirium. His shirts are examined by an expert, which naturally produces a positive result. Since we have a positive result, the case is submitted to a court: the proofs are submitted and a judgment, a condemnation, is pronounced, and we pretend to send the servant to prison.
There is, then, the organization of a labyrinth homogeneous with the delirious idea, and a sort of forked outcome is placed at the end of this labyrinth, an outcome at two levels, which, precisely, will bring about the cure. On the one hand, there will be an event produced within the delirium. That is to say, at the level of the patient's delirium, the impris- onment of the guilty party confirms the truth of the delirium, but, at the same time, assures the patient that he has been freed from what, within his delirium, was the cause of his illness. There is then this first result, at the level of the delirium itself, authenticating the delirium and getting rid of what it is that functions as cause within the delirium.
Now, at a different level, that is to say at the level of the doctors, of those around the patient, something very different happens. By pre- tending to imprison the servant, she is put out of play, she is separated from the patient, and the patient thus finds himself sheltered from what, in reality, was the cause of his illness, that is to say his mistrust and hatred of her. So that which is the cause within, and the cause of, his delirium are short-circuited in one and the same operation.
This operation had to be one and the same; that is to say, it had to take place at the end of the labyrinth of the delirium, because for the doctors it was quite clear that if the servant was purely and simply dismissed, without being dismissed as the cause within the delirium,
? then the delirium could have begun again. The patient would imagine that she was still pursuing him, that she had found a way o( getting round them, or he would redirect mistrust ot his servant on to someone else. From the moment that one effectuates the delirium, that one accords it reality, authenticates it and, at the same time, suppresses the cause within it, one has the conditions for the liquidation ol the delirium itself. * And if the conditions for liquidating the delirium are at the same time the suppression of what caused the delirium itsell, then the cure is assured as a result. So, it you like, there is both suppression ol the cause of delirium, and suppression of the cause within the delirium. And it is this kind ol fork, arrived at through the labyrinth ol fictional venlication, that assures the very principle of the cure.
Now--and this is the third moment--when the patient really believes that his delirium was the truth, when the patient believes that what, within his delirium, was the cause of his illness has been suppressed, then he discovers as a result the possibility of accepting medical intervention. On the pretext ol curing him of the illness inflicted on him by the servant, one slips into this kind of opening a medication that is medication within the delirium, a medication that within the delirium will enable him to escape the illness caused by the servant, and which is a medication for the dehr mm since he is actually given medicine that, by calming his humors, by calming his blood, by discharging all the congestions of his blood system, etcetera, ensures the cure. And again you can see that an element of reality, the medicine, functions at two levels: as medication within the delirium and as therapy for the delirium. It is this kind of organized game around the fictional verification of the delirium that effectively ensures the cure.
Okay, this game of truth, within delirium and of delirium, will be completely suppressed in the psychiatric practice that commences at the start of the nineteenth century. It seems to me that the emergence of what we can call a disciplinary practice, this new microphysics of power, will sweep all this away and establish the core elements of all the psychiatric scenes that develop subsequently, and on the basis of which psychiatric theory and the psychiatric institution will be built.
* The manuscript adds: "One really suppresses that which functions as the cause within the delirium, but it is suppressed in a form that the delirium can accept. "
Ui November 1973 35
? 36 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
1. "Philippe Pinel freeing the mad from their chains at Bicetre"--where, appointed on
6 August 1793, he took up his post as "infirmary doctor" on 11 September 1793--is the version given by his eldest son, Scipion Pinel (1795-1859), referring the event to 1792, in an apocryphal article attributed to his father: "Sur Pabolilion des chaines des alienes, par Philippe Pinel, membre d l'Institut. Note extraite de ses cahiers, communiques par M. Pinel fils" Archives de medicine, 1st year, vol. 2, May 1823, pp. 15 17; and communication to the Academy of Medicine: "Bicetre en 1792. De l'abolition des chaines" Memoires de I'Academie de medecine, no. 5, 1856, pp. 32-40. In 1849 the painter Charles Muller immor talized him in a painting entitled Pinel removes the chains from the mad of Bicetre. Foucault refers to this in Histoire de la folie, Part 3, ch. 4, pp. 483 484 and 496 501; Madness and Civilisation, ch. 9, pp. 241 243 (pages 484-501 of the French edition are omitted from the English translation).
2. P. Pinel, Traite medico-philosophique sur Valienation mentale, ou la Manie, section V: "Police interieure et surveillance a etablir dans les hospices d'alienation: ? vii, Les maniaques, durant leurs acces doivent ils etre condamnes a unc reclusion elroite? " pp. 192 193;
A Treatise on Insanity, "The importance of an enlightened system of police for the internal management ol lunatic asylums: Is close confinement requisite in all cases and throughout the whole term of acute mania? " pp. 187 188. George III (1738 1820), King of Great Britain and Ireland, had several episodes of mental disturbance in 1765, 1788 1789, lrom February to July 1810, and from October 1810 until his death on 29 January 1820. See
I. Macalpine and R. Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business (New York: Pantheon Books,
1969).
3. Sir Francis Willis (1718-1807), the proprietor ol an establishment in Lincolnshire for
people suffering irom mental disorders, was called to London on 5 December 1788 within the framework of a commission created by Parliament in order to pronounce on the King's condition. Willis looked alter George III until the remission of his disorder in March 1789. The episode referred to by Pinel is in "Observations sur le regime moral que est le plus propre a retablir, dans certains cas, la raison egaree des monarques" pp. 1} 15, reproduced
in J. Postel, Genese de la psychiatric Les premiers ecrits de Philippe Pinel (Le Plessis Robinson, Institut Synthelabo, 1998) pp. 194-197, and Traite medico-philosophique, pp. 192-193; A Treatise on Insanity, pp. 187 188, and pp. 286-290 in which Pinel quotes the Reportfrom the Committee Appointed to Examine the Physicians who Have Attended His Majesty during his Illness, touching the Present State of His Majesty's Health (London: 1789) [This latter section, entitled "Exemple memorable d'une discussion sur la manie, devenue une affaire d'etat," is omitted from the English translation; G. B. ]
4. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, written at the end of 1592 and the beginning of 1593, describes the accession to the throne, by usurpation, of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the brother ol King Edward IV, and then his death at the Battle of Bosworth.
5. The Tragedy of King Lear (performed at Court on 26 December 1606, first published in 1608, and then in a revised version in 1623). Foucault refers to King Lear in Histoire de la folie, p. 49; Madness and Civilisation, p. 31, and also refers to the work of A. Adnes,
6. 7. 8. 9-
Shakespeare et la folie. Etude medico-psychologique (Paris: Maloine, 1935) [the reference to Adnes is omitted from the English translation; G. B. ]. He returns to it in the Course at the College de France of 1983 1984, "Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Le courage de
la verite," lecture of 21 March 1984.
P. Pinel, Traite medico-philosophique, p. 192; A Treatise on Insanity, p. 188.
Ibid. p. 193; ibid. p. 188.
Ibid. ;ibid.
On 6 January 1838, the Minister of the Interior, Adrien de Gasparin, presented to the Chamber of Deputies a draft law on the insane, which was voted on by the Chamber of Peers on 22 March, and on 14 June by the Chamber of Deputies. It was promulgated on 30 June 1838. See, R. Castel, L'Ordre psychiatrique. Vage d'or de Valienisme (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1976) pp. 316-324; English translation, The Regulation of Madness, the origins of incarceration in France, trans. W. D. Halls (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) pp. 243-253.
? 10. P. Pinel, Traite medko-philosophique, p. 193; A Treatise on Insanity, p. 188.
11. Foucault is alluding here to Descartes evoking those "madmen, whose brains are so dam
aged by the persistent vapours of melancholia that they {irmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are (. . . ) made oi glass" Meditations touchanl la premiere philosophic (1641), trans, due de Luynes, 1647, "First meditation: Some things that one can put in doubt" in CEuvres et Lettres, A. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) p. 268; English translation, "Meditations on First Philosophy" trans. John Cottingham, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothofi, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) vol. 2, p. 13. See M. Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu" in Dits et Ecrits, 1954-1988, four volumes, ed. D. Delert and F. Ewald, with the collaboration ofj. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 245-268; English translation, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire" trans. Geofl Bennington, in M. Foucault, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-19&4, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1998)
j hereafter, Essential Works oj Foucault, 2 j.
12. E. J. Georget, De la folk. Considerations sur cette maladk, p. 282: "Nothing in the world can
persuade them otherwise. You tell ( . . . ) a supposed king that he is not a king and he will
reply with insults. "
13. J. Haslam, Observations on Insanity, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, and
Considerations on the Moral Management of Insane Persons.
14. P. Pinel, Traite medko-philosophique. The manuscript refers to cases that ligure in section II,
? vii, pp. 58 59; ? xxiii, pp. 96 97; and section V, ? 3, pp. 181-183, and ? 9, pp. 196 197;
A Treatise on Insanity, pp. 60-61; pp. 103 106; pp. 178 179; pp. 191 193.
15. J. E. D. Esquirol, Des maladies menlales; Mental Maladies.
16. F. E. Fodere, Traite du delire, and, Essai medico-legal sur les diverses especes dejolk vrak, simulee
et raisonnee, sur les causes el les moyens de les distinguer, sur leurs effets excusant ou atlenuant devant les tribunaux, et sur leur association avec les penchants au crime et pluskurs maladies physiques et morales (Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1832).
17. E. J. Georget, De la folk, and, De la physiologic du sysleme nerveux et specialement du cerveau. Rechcrches sur les maladies nerveuses en general, et en particulier sur le siege, la nature et le traitement de I'hysterk, de Vhypocondrie, de I'epilepsie et de I'aslhmc convulsij, 2 volumes ( P a n s :
J. B. Bailliere, 1821).
18. Joseph Guislain (1797 i860), Traite sur {'alienation mentale et sur les hospices des alienes, 2 volumes
(Amsterdam: Van der Hey and Gartman, 1826), and, Traite sur les phrenopathks ou Doctrine naturelle nouvelle des maladies menlales, basee sur des observations pratiques el stalistiques, et I'elude des causes, de la nature des symptomes, du pronostic, du diagnostic et du traitement de ces affections (Brussels: Etablissement Encyclographique, 1833).
19- P. Pinel, Traite medko-philosophique, section II, ? vii, pp. 58 59; A Treatise on Insanity, pp. 60-61.
20. Ibid. ? xxiii, pp. 96 97n; ibid. p. 100n.
21. Ibid, section V, ? iii, pp. 181 183; ibid. pp. 178 179.
22.
Francois Leuret develops his conceptions in "Memoire sur le traitement moral de la folie"
in Memoires de VAcademic royale de medecine, vol. 7 (Paris: 1838) pp. 552 276; Du traitement moral de la folk', "Memoire sur la revulsion morale dans la traitement de la folie" in Memoires de I Academic royale de medecine, vol. 9 (Paris: 1841) pp. 655 671; and Des indications a suivre dans le traitement moral de lajolie (Paris: Le Normant, 1846).
23. WTien she was 42 years old, Mary Barnes, a nurse, entered the reception center ol Kmgsley Hall, which opened in 1965 for staff suffering from mental problems, before closing on 31 May 1970. She spent five years there and her history is known to us through the work she wrote with her therapist: M. Barnes and J. Berke, Mary Barnes. Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1971) pp. 248-249; French translation, Mary Barnes. Un voyage autour de lafolk, trans. M. Davidovici (Paris: Le Seuil, 1973) pp. 287 288.
24. Joseph Mason Cox (1763 1818), Practical Observations on Insanity (London: Baldwin and Murray, 1806), Case IV, pp. 535; French translation, Observations sur la demence, trans. L. Odier (Geneva: Bibliotheque Britannique, 1806) pp. 80-81. [It has not been possible to consult a copy of the 1st 1804 edition of Mason Cox on which the 1806 French translation is based. English page references are to the 2nd, 1806 edition; G. B. ]
7// November 1973 37
? thi&ee
21 NOVEMBER 1973
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. " The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. rKJ Forms of disciplinary power: army, police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. r^J Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and
constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
WE CAN SAY THAT between 1850 and 1930 classical psychiatry reigned and functioned without too many external problems on the basis of what it considered to be, and put to work as, a true discourse. At any rate, from this discourse it deduced the need for the asylum insti- tution as well as the need to deploy a medical power as an internal and effective law within this institution. In short, it deduced the need for an institution and a power from a supposedly true discourse.
It seems to me that we can say that criticism of the institution--I hesitate to say "antipsychiatry"--let's say a certain form of criticism which developed from around 1930 to 1940,1 did not start from a supposedly true psychiatric discourse in order to deduce the need for an institution and a medical power, but rather from the fact of the institution and its func- tioning, and from criticism of the institution that sought to bring to light, on the one hand, the violence of the medical power exercised within it, and, on the other, the effects of incomprehension that right from the start dis torted the supposed truth of this medical discourse. So, if you like, this form of analysis started from the institution in order to denounce power and analyse effects of incomprehension.
? 40 PSYCHIATRIC POWER
What I would like to do instead is try to bring this problem of power to the fore, which is why I have begun the lectures in the way I have. I will leave the relationships between this analysis of power and the problem of the truth of a discourse on madness until a bit later. 2
I started then with this scene of George III confronted by his servants who were, at the same time, agents of medical power, because it seemed to me a fine example of the confrontation between a power, which, in the person of the king himself, is sovereign power embodied in this mad king, and another type of power, which is instead anonymous and silent, and which, paradoxically, gets support from the servants' strength, from a muscular, obedient force not articulated in discourse. So, on the one hand, there is the king's furious outburst and, facing this, the controlled force of the servants. And the therapeutic process presupposed by Willis and, after him, Pinel, consisted in getting madness to migrate from a sovereignty it drove wild and within which it exploded, to a discipline supposed to subjugate it. What appears in this capture of madness, prior to any institution and outside any discourse of truth, was therefore a power that I call "disciplinary power. "
What is this power? I would like to advance the hypothesis that something like disciplinary power exists in our society. By this I mean no more than a particular, as it were, terminal, capillary form of power; a final relay, a particular modality by which political power, power in gen- eral, finally reaches the level of bodies and gets a hold on them, taking actions, behavior, habits, and words into account; the way in which power converges below to affect individual bodies themselves, to work on, mod- ify, and direct what Servan called "the soft fibers of the brain. "3 In other words, I think that in our society disciplinary power is a quite specific modality of what could be called the synaptic contact of bodies-power. *
The second hypothesis is that disciplinary power, in its specificity, has a history; it is not born suddenly, has not always existed, and is formed and follows a diagonal trajectory, as it were, through Western society. If we take only the history going from the Middle Ages until our own time, I think we can say that the formation of this power, in its
* The manuscript adds: "Methodologically this entails leaving the problem of the State, of the State apparatus, to one side and dispensing with the psycho-sociological notion of authority. "
? specific characteristics, was not completely marginal to medieval society, but it was certainly not central either. It was formed within religious communities from where, being transformed in the process, it was taken into the lay communities that developed and multiplied in the pre- Reformation period, let's say in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Wt can see this transfer to communities like the famous "Brothers of the Common Life," which are not exactly monastic but which, on the basis of techniques taken from monastic life, as well as ascetic exercises taken from a whole tradition of religious exercises, defined disciplinary meth- ods for daily life and pedagogy/1 This is just one example of the spread of monastic or ascetic disciplines before the Reformation. We then see these techniques gradually spreading far afield, penetrating sixteenth, and especially seventeenth and eighteenth century society, and, in the nineteenth century, becoming the major general form of this synaptic contact: political power-individual body.
To take a somewhat symbolic reference point, I think this evolution, which goes from the Brethren of the Common Life, that is to say from the fourteenth century, to its point of explosion, that is to say, when discipli- nary power becomes an absolutely generalized social form, ends up, in 1791, with Bentham's Panopticon, which provides the most general political and technical formula of disciplinary power. 5 I think the confrontation between George III and his servants--which is more or less contemporaneous with the Panopticon--this confrontation of the king's madness and medical disci- pline is one of the historical and symbolic points of the emergence and definitive installation of disciplinary power in society. Now I do not think that we can analyze how psychiatry functions by restricting ourselves to the workings of the asylum institution. Obviously there's no question of analyzing how psychiatry functions starting from its supposedly true discourse; but nor do I think we can understand how it functions by ana lyzmg the institution. The mechanism of psychiatry should be understood starting from the way in which disciplinary power works.
So, what is this disciplinary power? This is what I would like to talk about this evening.
21 November 1973 41
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It is not very easy to study it. First of all, because I will take a fairly broad time scale; I will take examples from disciplinary forms that appear in the sixteenth century and develop up until the eighteenth century. It is not easy because, in order to study this disciplinary power, this meeting point of the body and power, it must be analyzed in contrast with another type of power, which preceded it and which will be juxtaposed to it. This is what I will begin to do, without being very certain, moreover, ol what I will say.
It seems to me that we could oppose disciplinary power to a power that preceded it historically and with which it was entangled for a long time before finally prevailing in turn. I will call this earlier form of power, in opposition then to disciplinary power, the power of sovereignty, but with out being exactly happy with this word lor reasons you will soon see.
*
What is the power of sovereignty? It seems to me to be a power relationship that links sovereign and subject according to a couple of asymmetrical relationships: a levy or deduction one side, and expendi ture on the other. In the relationship ol sovereignty, the sovereign imposes a levy on products, harvests, manufactured objects, arms, the labor force, and courage. In a symmetrical reverse process, at the same time as he imposes a levy on services, there will be, not repayment for what he has deducted, for the sovereign does not have to pay back, but the sovereign's expenditure, which may take the form of the gift, which may be made during ritual ceremonies, such as gifts for happy events, like a birth, or gifts of service, such as the service of protection or the religious service ensured by the Church, for example, very different from the kind of service he has levied. It may also be the outlay of expenditure when, for festivals, for the organization of a war, the lord makes those around him work in return for payment. So this system of levy expenditure seems to me to be typical of this sovereign type of power. Of course, deductions always largely exceed expenditure, and the dissymmetry is so great that, behind this relationship of sovereignty and this dissymmetrical coupling of levy-expenditure, we can see quite clearly the emergence of plunder, pillage, and war.
? Second, I think the relationship ol sovereignty always bears the mark of a founding precedence. For there to be a relationship of sovereignty there must be something like divine right, or conquest, a victory, an act of submission, an oath of loyalty, an act passed between the sovereign who grants privileges, aid, protection, and so lorth, and someone who, in return, pledges himself; or there must be something like birth, the rights of blood. In short, we can say that the relationship oi sovereignty always looks back to something that constituted its definitive founda- tion. But this does not mean that this relationship of sovereignty does not have to be regularly or irregularly reactualized; a characteristic fea- ture o( the relationship of sovereignty is that is always reactualized by things like ceremonies and rituals, by narratives also, and by gestures, distinguishing signs, required forms of greeting, marks ol respect, insignia, coats of arms, and suchlike. That the relationship ol sovereignty is thus founded on precedence and reactualized by a number of more or less ritual actions stems Irom the tact that the relationship is, in a sense, intangible, that it is given once and tor all but, at the same time, is Iragile and always liable to disuse or breakdown. For the relationship of sovereignty to really hold, outside of the rite of recommencement and reactuahzation, outside ol the game ol ritual signs, there is always the need for a certain supplement or threat of violence, which is there behind the relationship of sovereignty, and which sustains it and ensures that it holds. The other side of sovereignty is violence, it is war.
The third feature ol relationships of sovereignty is that they are not iso topic. By this I mean that they are intertwined and tangled up with each other in such a way that we cannot establish a system of exhaustive and planned hierarchy between them. In other words, relationships of sover- eignty are indeed perpetual relationships of differentiation, but they are not relationships of classification; they do not constitute a unitary hierar- chical table with subordinate and superordinate elements. Not being iso- topic means first of all that they are heterogeneous and have no common measure. There is, for example, the relationship of sovereignty between serf and lord, and a different relationship of sovereignty, which absolutely cannot be superimposed on this, between the holder of a fief and a suzerain, and there is the relationship of sovereignty exercised by the priest with regard to the laity, and all these relationships cannot be
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integrated withm a genuinely single system. Furthermore--this again marks the non-isotopic nature of the relationship of sovereignty--the elements it involves, that it puts into play, are not equivalents: a relation ship of sovereignty may perfectly well concern the relationship between a sovereign or a suzerain--I do not distinguish them in an analysis as schematic as this--and a family, a community, or the inhabitants of a parish or a region; but sovereignty may also bear on something other than these human multiplicities. Sovereignty may bear on land, a road, an instrument of production--a mill, for example--and on users: those who pass through a tollgate, along a road, fall under the relationship of sovereignty.
So you can see that the relationship of sovereignty is a relationship in which the subject element is not so much, and we can even say it is almost never, an individual, an individual body. The relationship of sovereignty applies not to a somatic singularity but to multiplicities--like lamilies, users--which in a way are situated above physical individuality, or, on the contrary, it applies to fragments or aspects of individuality, of somatic singularity. It is insofar as one is the son ot X, a bourgeois of this town, etcetera, that one will be held in a relationship of sovereignty, that one will be sovereign or, alternatively, subject, and one may be both subject and sovereign in different aspects, so that these relationships can never be wholly plotted and laid out according to the terms of a single table.
In other words, in a relationship of sovereignty, what I call the subject-function moves around and circulates above and below somatic singularities, and, conversely, bodies circulate, move around, rest on something here, and take flight. In these relationships of sovereignty there is therefore a never ending game of movements and disputes in which subject-functions and somatic singularities, let's say--with a word I am not very happy with for reasons you will soon see--individuals, are moved around in relation to each other. The pinning of the subject function to a definite body can only take place at times in a discontinu ous, incidental fashion, in ceremonies for example. It takes place when the individual's body is marked by an insignia, by the gesture he makes: in homage, for example, when a somatic singularity is effectively marked with the seal of the sovereignty that accepts it. Or it takes place in the violence with which sovereignty asserts its rights and forcibly imposes them on someone it subjects. So, at the actual level at which the
? relationship of sovereignty is applied, at the lower extremity of the rela- tionship, if you like, you never find a perfect fit between sovereignty and corporeal singularities.
On the other hand, if you look towards the summit you will see there the individualization absent at the base; you begin to see it sketched out towards the top. There is a sort of underlying individualization of the relationship of sovereignty towards the top, that is to say, towards the sovereign. The power of sovereignty necessarily entails a sort of monar chical spiral. That is to say, precisely insofar as the power of sovereignty is not isotopic but entails never ending disputes and movements, to the extent that plunder, pillage, and war still rumble behind these sovereign relationships, and the individual as such is never caught in the relation ship, then, at a given moment and coming from above, there must be something that ensures arbitration: there must be a single, individual point which is the summit of this set of heterotopic relationships that absolutely cannot be plotted on one and the same table.
The sovereign's individuality is entailed by the non-individualization of the elements on which the relationship of sovereignty is applied. Consequently there is the need for something like a sovereign who, in his own body, is the point on which all these multiple, different, and irreconcilable relationships converge. Thus, at the summit of this type of power, there is necessarily something like the king in his individuality, with his king's body. But straightaway you see a very odd phenomenon, which has been studied by Kantorowicz in his book The King's Two Bodies:6 in order to ensure his sovereignty, the king really must be an individual with a body, but this body must not die along with the king's somatic singularity. The monarchy must remain when the monarch no longer exists; the king's body, which holds together all these relation- ships of sovereignty, must not disappear with the death of this individ- ual X or Y. The king's body, therefore, must have a kind of permanence; more than just his somatic singularity, it must be the solidity of his realm, of his crown. So that the individualization we see outlined at the summit of the relationship of sovereignty entails the multiplication of the king's body. The king's body is at least double according to Kantorowicz, and on closer examination, starting from a certain period at least, it is probably an absolutely multiple body.
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So I think we can say that the relationship of sovereignty does put some- thing like political power in contact with the body, applies it to the body, but that it never reveals individuality/ It is a form oi power without an individualizing function, or which only outlines individuality on the sov ereign's side, and again, at the cost of this curious, paradoxical, and mytho logical multiplication of bodies. We have bodies without any individuality on one side, and individuality but a multiplicity of bodies on the other.
Okay, now for disciplinary power, since this is what I particularly want to talk about.
I think we could contrast it almost term for term with sovereignty. First ol all, disciplinary power does not make use of this mechanism, this asym metrical coupling of levy expenditure. In a disciplinary apparatus there is no dualism, no asymmetry; there is not this kind of fragmented hold. It seems to me that disciplinary power can be characterized first of all by the (act that it does not involve imposing a levy on the product or on a part of time, or on this or that category of service, but that it is a total hold, or, at any rate, tends to be an exhaustive capture of the individual's body, actions, time, and behavior. It is a seizure of the body, and not of the prod uct; it is a seizure of time in its totality, and not of the time of service.
We have a very clear example of this in the appearance of military dis cipline at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the course ol the eighteenth century. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, roughly until the Thirty Years War, military discipline did not exist; what existed was a never-ending transition from vagabondage to the army. That is to say, the army was always constituted by a group of people recruited for a finite time for the needs of the cause, and to whom food and lodging were assured through pillage and the occupation of any premises found on the spot. In other words, in this system, which was still part of the order of sovereignty, a certain amount of time was deducted from people's lives, some of their resources were deducted by the requirement that they bring their arms, and they were promised something like the reward of pillage.
* The manuscript clarifies: "The subject pole never coincides continually with the somatic singularity, except in the ritual of branding. "
? From the middle of the seventeenth century you see something like the disciplinary system appearing in the army; that is to say an army lodged in barracks and in which the soldiers are engaged. That is to say, they are engaged for the whole day for the duration of the campaign, and, apart from demobilizations, they are equally engaged during peace- time, because, from 1750 or 1760, when his life of soldiering comes to an end, the soldier receives a pension and becomes a retired soldier. Military discipline begins to be the general confiscation of the body, time, and life; it is no longer a levy on the individual's activity but an occupation of his body, life, and time. Every disciplinary system tends, I think, to be an occupation of the individual's time, Hie, and body. 7
Second, the disciplinary system does not need this discontinuous, ritual, more or less cyclical game of ceremonies and marks in order to Junction. Disciplinary power is not discontinuous but involves a procedure of con- tinuous control instead. In the disciplinary system, one is not available for someone's possible use, one is perpetually under someone's gaze, or, at any rate, in the situation of being observed. One is not then marked by an action made once and for all, or by a situation given from the start, but vis ible and always in the situation of being under constant observation. More precisely, we can say that there is no reference to an act, an event, or an orig- inal right in the relationship of disciplinary power. Disciplinary power refers instead to a final or optimum state. It looks forward to the future, towards the moment when it will keep going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be required, when discipline, consequently, will have become habit. There is a genetic polarization, a temporal gradient in disci pline, exactly the opposite of the reference to precedence that is necessarily involved in relationships of sovereignty. All discipline entails this kind of genetic course by which, from a point, which is not given as the inescapable situation, but as the zero point of the start of discipline, something must develop such that discipline will keep going by itself. What is it, then, that ensures this permanent functioning of discipline, this kind of genetic con-
tinuity typical of disciplinary power? It is obviously not the ritual or cycli- cal ceremony, but exercise; progressive, graduated exercise will mark out the growth and improvement of discipline on a temporal scale.
Here again we can take the army as our example. In the army as it existed in the form I call the power of sovereignty, there was certainly
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something that could be called exercises, but actually its function was not at all that of disciplinary exercise: there were things like jousts and games. That is to say, warriors, those at least who were warriors by status--nobles and knights--regularly practiced jousting and suchlike. We could interpret this as a sort exercise, as a training of the body, in a sense, but I think it was essentially a kind of repetition of bravery, a test by which the individual displayed that he was in a permanent state of readiness to assert his status as a knight and so do honor to the situa tion in which he exercised certain rights and obtained certain privileges. The joust was perhaps a kind of exercise, but I think it was above all the cyclical repetition of the great test by which a knight became a knight.
On the other hand, from the eighteenth century, especially with Frederick II and the Prussian army, you see the appearance of physical exercise in the army, something that hardly existed before. In the army of Frederick II, and in western armies at the end of eighteenth century, this physical exercise does not consist in things like jousting, that is to say, the repetition and reproduction of the actions of war. Physical exer- cise is a training of the body; it is the training of skill, marching, resis- tance, and elementary movements in accordance with a graduated scale, completely different from the cyclical repetition of jousts and games. So what I think is typical of discipline is not ceremony, but exercise as the means for assuring this [sort] of genetic continuity. 8
I think discipline necessarily resorts to writing as an instrument of this control, of the permanent and overall taking charge of the individual's body. That is to say, whereas the relation of sovereignty entails the actualization of the distinctive mark, I think we could say that discipline, with its require- ment of complete visibility, its constitution of genetic paths, this kind of typical hierarchical continuum, necessarily calls on writing. This is first of all to ensure that everything that happens, everything the individual does and says, is graded and recorded, and then to transmit this information from below up through the hierarchical levels, and then, finally, to make this information accessible and thereby assure the principle of omnivisibility, which is, I think, the second major characteristic of discipline.
It seems to me that the use of writing is absolutely necessary for dis- ciplinary power to be total and continuous, and I think we could study the way in which, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the
? army as in schools, in centers of apprenticeship as in the police or judicial system, people's bodies, behavior, and discourse are gradually besieged by a tissue of writing, by a sort of graphic plasma which records them, codifies them, and passes them up through the hierarchy to a centralized p o i n t / I think this direct and continuous relationship of writing to the body is new. The visibility of the body and the perma- nence of writing go together, and obviously their effect is what could be called schematic and centralized individualization.
I will take just two examples of this game of writing in discipline. The first is in the schools of apprenticeship that are formed in the sec ond half of the seventeenth century and multiply during the eighteenth century. Consider corporative apprenticeship in the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth and still in the seventeenth centuries. For a fee, an apprentice joined a master whose only obligation, in return for this sum of money, was to pass on the whole of his learning to the apprentice. In return the apprentice had to provide the master with any services the latter demanded. There was an exchange, then, of daily service for the major service of the transmission of knowledge. At the end of the apprentice- ship, there was only a form of checking, the masterpiece, which was sub- mitted to the jurande, that is to say a jury of the responsible individuals of the town's corporation or professional body.
Now a completely new type of institution appears in the second half of the seventeenth century. As an example of this, I will take the Gobelins' professional school of design and tapestry, which was orga- nized in 1667 and gradually improved up until an important regulation of 1737. 9 Apprenticeship takes place here in a completely different way. That is to say, the students are first of all divided up according to age, and a certain type of work is given to each age block. This work must be done in the presence either of teachers or supervisors, and it must be assessed at the same time and together with assessment of the student's behavior, assiduity, and zeal while performing his work. These assess- ments are entered on registers which are kept and passed on up the hier- archy to the director of the Gobelins' manufacture himself, and, on this
* The manuscripts says: "Bodies, actions, behaviors, and discourses are gradually besieged by a tissue of writing, a graphic plasma, which records them, codifies them, and schematizes them. "
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basis, a succinct report is sent to the minister of the King's Household concerning the quality of the work, the student's abilities, and whether he can now be considered a master. A whole network of writing is con- stituted around the apprentice's behavior, and this will first codify all his behavior in terms of a number of assessments determined in advance, then schematize it, and finally convey it to a point of centralization which will define his ability or inability There is, then, an investment by writing, codification, transfer, and centralization, in short, the constitution of a schematic and centralized individuality
We could say the same thing about the police discipline established in most European countries, and especially in France, in the second half of the eighteenth century. Police practice in the area of writing was still very simple in the second half of the seventeenth century: when an infraction was committed that was not a court matter, the lieutenant of the police (or his deputies) took charge and made a decision, which was simply notified. And then, in the course of the eighteenth century, gradually you see the individual beginning to be completely besieged by writing. That is to say, you see the appearance of visits to maisons d'internement to check up on the individual: why was he arrested, when was he arrested, how has he conducted himself since, has he made progress, and so on? The system is refined and in the second half of the eighteenth century you see the constitution of files for those who have simply come to the notice of the police, or whom the police suspect of something. Around the 1760s, I think, the police are required to make two copies of reports on those they suspect--reports which must be kept up to date, of course--one remaining on the spot, enabling a check to be made on the individual where he lives, and a copy sent to Paris, which is centralized at the min istry and redistributed to the other regions falling under different lieu- tenants of police, so that the individual can be immediately identified if he moves. Biographies are constituted in this way, or, in actual fact, police individualities based on the techniques of what I will call perpetual investment by writing. This administrative and centralized individuality is constituted in 1826 when a way is found to apply the cataloguing tech- niques already in use in libraries and botanical gardens. 10
Finally, the continuous and endless visibility assured by writing has an important effect: the extreme promptness of the reaction of disciplinary
? power that this perpetual visibility in the disciplinary system made possible. Unlike sovereign power--which only intervenes violently, from time to time, and in the form of war, exemplary punishment, or ceremony--disciplinary power will be able to intervene without halt from the first moment, the first action, the first hint. Disciplinary power has an inherent tendency to intervene at the same level as what is happening, at the point when the virtual is becoming real; disciplinary power always tends to intervene beforehand, before the act itself if possible, and by means of an infra judicial interplay of supervision, rewards, punishments, and pressure.
If we can say that the other side of sovereignty was war, I think we can say that the other side of the disciplinary relationship is punishment, both miniscule and continuous punitive pressure.
Here again, we could take an example of this from work discipline, from discipline in the workshop. In workers' contracts which were signed, and this was sometimes the case very early on, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the worker typically had to end his work before a given time, or he had to give so many days work to his patron. It he did not finish the work or provide the full number of days, then he had to give either the equivalent of what was lacking, or add on a certain quan tity of work or money as amends. So there was, if you like, a punitive system that hung on, worked on and starting from what had actually been done, as either damage or fault.
On the other hand, from the eighteenth century you see the birth ol a subtle system of workshop discipline that focuses on potential behavior. In the workshop regulations distributed at this time you see a compar- ative supervision of workers, their lateness and absences noted down to the last minute; you also see the punishment of anything that might involve distraction. For example, a Gobelins regulation of 1680 notes that even hymns sung while working must be sung quietly so as not to disturb one's fellow workers. 11 There are regulations against telling bawdy stories when returning from lunch or dinner, because this dis tracts the workers who will then lack the calmness of mind required for work. So, there is a continuous pressure of this disciplinary power, which is not brought to bear on an offense or damage but on potential behavior. One must be able to spot an action even before it has been
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performed, and disciplinary power must intervene somehow before the actual manifestation of the behavior, before the body, the action, or the discourse, at the level of what is potential, disposition, will, at the level of the soul. In this way something, the soul, is projected behind disci- plinary power, but it is a very different soul from the one defined by Christian practice and theory.
