 Thank you for coming out at an unusual time at 5pm on a Tuesday to talk about Foucault. So for those of you who don't know, Foucault is who I did my graduate research on. So I know this text pretty well, but as I was telling some of my students anyway, there are still parts of it that I'm not entirely sure I understand fully. So even if you study it very carefully, there may be things you don't quite get and that's just par for the course. So we're talking about Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which came out in 1975, but I personally am quite amazed at how similar it is to many concerns people have today. And we're going to talk about that a little bit here and probably more in seminars. The first thing I want to mention is you see here on my picture of my French copy of this book, the title is different in French. So I'll just go to that. This is the French title. Suveille est punis. So punis is punishment to punish. Suveille, apparently, according to the translator, doesn't have a really good English equivalent. Now my French is mediocre at best, so I'm just going to have to rely on this person's judgment. I mean, I know what the verb surveille means. It means to survey, right? We have a verb in English for it, but the translator says in the very beginning of the translator's note that this word doesn't really translate well into English. So here's what he says. The verb surveille has no adequate English equivalent. Our noun surveillance has an altogether too restricted and technical use. Jeremy Bentham used the term inspect, but the range of connotations does not correspond. Supervised is perhaps closest to all, but again, the word has different associations. Observe is perhaps rather too neutral. Although Foucault is aware of the aggression involved in any one-sided observation. So in the end, Foucault himself is the one who suggested discipline and punish. And that still fits the nature of the text because a lot of the text is about discipline, which is what we're going to talk about. But I, you know, in a way, I think of this text a lot in terms of surveillance and the word to survey or surveying, which is just sort of back-created from the word surveillance in English. But what does that word connote to you? Surveillance. What does that suggest to you? I'm sorry? Government. Yeah, to me too, right? So government surveillance of something. Yeah? I'm sorry, I missed that part. Consistently observing. Do you mean like a lot over time? Like, you don't, yeah, good. So it's like a constant overarching type of thing. Good, anything else? Yeah. Beaver of Vendetta, yeah. Big brother, yes. So it does. To me, it also has this really negative feel like surveillance, like I'm being watched at all times. And to some degree, that fits with what Foucault is talking about. I mean, by the time you read through the section on discipline and panopticism, there is a lot of that sort of heavy emphasis on, oh my God, I'm being watched constantly. And it does seem rather negative. But it's not just from the government. It's not just from sort of official sources that would be surveying you, like the police or something. So it is more something that can happen from any number of sources. So you can be surveyed, you can be observed, you can be watched, not just from sort of a central source, but from all kinds of areas, even by each other. And I don't know why the translator thought our verb survey or surveillance was not good enough to translate. But it may be something like that, that it feels a little bit too institutional or too official when, in fact, the sort of observation and who goes talking about can come from anywhere, right? Okay, the stuff he's talking about is still important today. I mean, the first thing I think of when I reread this text is all of the stuff that people are discussing in terms of the internet and how we're being watched at all times. These are our headlines from the last four are from the last year. In fact, the blue one is from last week. The one on top is from 2013, but they're all very recent, right? The internet is a surveillance state. Is your fitness tracker spying on you? That one, I had to read that one when it came out. I was like, what are you talking about? So apparently, this is what I remember from the story of the CDC. Apparently, you know, those like Fitbits and that sort of thing. So not all of them, but some of them will continue to transmit information about your activities, even when you're not connecting it to your computer and it transmits it over Bluetooth and anybody can be watching. That's part of the issue. Also, nobody knows what happens with that data. You know, you get it, but who else gets it? That's part of the concern. UK surveillance laws will keep citizens' internet history on file for 12 months. Of course, we all know, I hope, that your internet browsing history is easily watched by a number of people, including your internet service provider. If you use Google and you're logged into a Google account, they keep track of where you go. They say they only keep it for a certain number of days, like a few months, but, you know, it is sort of tracked. And of course, that's mostly for advertising purposes. There's also concern, and that isn't in any of the headlines, but I recently read that on any website that has those little Facebook or Twitter buttons that you can click and say, share on Facebook, that even if you don't click it, Facebook is somehow keeping track of who goes to those pages in your IP address, even if you don't click the button. So there's all these concerns that you may have heard about, that we're being tracked at all times. How to stop Facebook from tracking all your web activity. Yes, Google Maps is tracking you, here's how to stop it. So Google Maps, if you don't turn off this option, you can go into Google Maps and you can see every place you've been for the past year or two years or three years, according to whenever you've used Google Maps. So that's kind of interesting. You can turn it off, and maybe you want that, and maybe you don't want Google Maps or anybody else to know all that information. So these things are still really very prominent, right? The, what he's talking about did not end in 1975. In fact, possibly has gotten worse. So the first part of the lecture, I'm gonna talk a little bit about Foucault and some of his other theories that are relevant to this book, and then we'll get into the text. And I'm not gonna say a whole lot about Foucault as a person, as his biography. There are a couple things that I think are quite relevant. So he basically was an intellectual in France. I mean, that was mostly his role. He taught in a number of universities. He was educated in philosophy, history, the history of science, psychology. So he taught in a number of places of higher education and he published a lot of books. These books are about Foucault. I chose these books because they have pictures of him. And there aren't any public domain pictures of Foucault that I can find anywhere. So I just take pictures of my own books and put them up here, so because that way I think I'm okay with copyright. I'm being surveyed, of course. Am I violating copyright? Someone's gonna know. So he wrote a number of books on things like punishment, obviously, but also on hospitals, on madness and asylums, on sexuality and sexuality research. So most of his work and his life was doing research, publishing, teaching, giving lectures. He was also very prominent public intellectual. And that's a term that really fits a number of people in France at the time and a little bit earlier, but I don't see so many of them anymore. By a public intellectual, I mean somebody who is out there in the public. People know who he is. People turn on the TV and there he is doing interviews. He's on the radio. He's in newspapers. He was a very popular figure. So he wasn't just someone doing research in a university that nobody else knew about. He also spent some time in various countries around the world, including Sweden, Poland, Germany, Tunisia. And what he was doing there was working in consulates, in French consulates. And part of the reason, according to one of his biographers, that he wanted to get out of France, and this was in the, oh, 50s and 60s or so, is because he felt like he couldn't live the way he wanted to in France. And he was a self, well, maybe not self-acknowledged, but he was a homosexual. And there were restrictions in France on who could teach at a university and who could work for the government based on their sexual characteristics. He had a long-term relationship with someone. He wasn't out there being super public about it, but people did know about it. So he didn't feel that safe, that free in France. So he ended up moving into various places and living in various places. But eventually was called back to France to teach at a new university. So this obviously by that point in the late 60s wasn't a concern anymore. And in 1969 and then for the rest of his life, he taught at this institution that still exists called the Collège de France. The Collège de France is a really interesting institution because what happens there is people just give public lectures on their research. Anybody can attend. So again, that notion of publicity, of being out there in the public, even in his teaching job at university was a public teaching job. And in a way, I mean, I guess anybody can attend arts one lectures too, right? But it's just not a thing like it is in the Collège de France. The one thing that's really important, I think that's really relevant to what we're talking about with this text is that in 1970 to 1972, so just three years before this text was published, 1972, this text was published in 75, he was part of something called the Prisoners Information Group in France, which was started in order to gather information about the prisons, about people's lives in the prisons, what it's like, what goes on in the prisons because apparently a lot of people felt like there just wasn't much information about that. So here's a little bit from their manifesto of the Prisoners Information Group. Little information is published on prisons and this is actually Foucault, I think Foucault wrote this. It is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life. We have the right to know, we want to know. So there's so much going on in prisons and it's just sort of hidden, right? We don't really understand necessarily what's actually happening and I would argue that's probably still the case to some extent at least. So we, the Prisoners Information Group, were proposed to make known what the prison is, who goes there, how and why they go there, what happens there, what the life of the prisoners is and that equally of the surveillance personnel, what the buildings, the food and hygiene are like, how the internal regulations, medical control and workshops function, et cetera, et cetera. What they did was they wrote up a questionnaire and they invited anybody who has any relationship to prisons whether ex-prisoners, current prisoners, warders, guardians, et cetera. They could fill out this questionnaire and present information to this group which then published this information in pamphlets, in press releases, they gave speeches. So they were just trying to make information known. But crucially, and this is gonna come up in the next slides, he says in this manifesto, it is not for us, those of us who are gathering this information to suggest reform. We wish merely to know the reality. It's not for us to suggest reform. And this was a group of intellectuals, it was a group of activists, but they weren't necessarily the people who were in the prisons or who were involved in the prison system in any way. They just wanted to gather the information and they were good at that and they could publicize it. But they weren't the ones who were gonna do the reform. So what happened in 72 is this group was disbanded after a lot of information had been published and they helped another group to form which was made up of ex-prisoners, ex-guards, current guards, et cetera, who then tried to push for reforms in the prisons. Now that's I think very relevant to what Foucault thinks and says about his role as an intellectual. So these are kind of long quotes, but we don't have them in our book and I think they're important to understanding what he's trying to do overall in his work. So he claims, when I write a book, I refuse to take a prophetic stance to be a prophet. That is the one of saying to people, here is what you must do. And also, this is good and this is not. So he's not trying to say, here I am, the intellectual, the philosopher, the researcher who can tell you what you ought to do and what's good and what's not. That's not my role, he says. I say to them, roughly speaking, it seems to me that things have gone this way. But I describe those things in such a way that the possible paths of attack are delineated. So it's as if he's saying, look, my role as a philosopher, as a historian, as a social scientist is to tell you what is happening or what has happened, in this case, with history. And then, maybe through that, give you a hint as to where, if you don't like it, where you might try to attack, but not tell you what you ought to do. He says going on, I would like to produce some effects of truth, which might be used for a possible battle, to be waged by those who wish to wage it, not by me, necessarily, because I'm not the one directly involved, in forms yet to be found and in organizations yet to be defined. So he says this kind of thing in a number of interviews that all he's there to do is to explain what's happening or what has happened and then leave it to those who are more directly involved to figure out what reforms need to happen, if any, how to resist the powers that be, if need be. And another good quote about this, from another interview, my role is to address problems, effectively, really, and to pose them with the greatest possible rigor. The problems that I try to address cannot be easily resolved. It takes years, decades of work, carried out at the grassroots level with the people directly involved, which he is not necessarily always directly involved. And the right to speech and political imagination must be returned to them. So some people criticize the scholar in the Ivory Tower who does their research locked away from the realities of the world, and certainly philosophers sometimes look like this, and then says, well, here is what you ought to do from my position in the Ivory Tower. But Foucault is acutely aware of that. In another interview, he says, we shouldn't have people speaking for others. It's not my role to speak for other people who are directly involved in whatever particular struggle that he might be talking about. So in this case, he's talking about prisons, he's talking about punishments. In other books, he's talking about madness and asylums. In another book, he's talking about sexuality and the arguments for and against heterosexuality, homosexuality, and those kinds of questions. And he's saying, look, it's not my role to tell you exactly how you ought to approach these things because you who are directly involved in those struggles have to figure that out for yourself. You know better than I do what's gonna work in your particular context. So that's why I think it's important to think about the fact that when he was working with the prisons, all he did was to collect information. That's what he found his role was. Collect information, I should say, and publish information, not just collect it and keep it, but also make it known to others and then leave the reform to other people. And then we can think about, and I've got one more slide about what I think he's trying to do in this book. We can think about the degree to which that seems to characterize what's happening in this book. And you can talk about that maybe in seminars. But there's one other aspect to this text that I wanted to mention, and one other aspect to his role as an intellectual. So at the end of the first chapter, pages 30 and 31, he talks a little bit about the present day and his approach, which is a historical one. So on page 30, he's talking about the beginning of the paragraph that punishment in general and the prison in particular belonged to a political technology of the body, which he's been talking about already in that chapter, is a lesson I have learned not so much from history as from the present. And then he goes on to talk about certain revolts that have been happening in prisons, which were partly as a result of that group presenting the information that it did. But if you notice, this book is all pretty much all historical. I mean, it starts off in the 18th century, he ends up in the 19th century. And then there's a little bit more at the end that I didn't ask you to read, but most of it is history, yet he's interested in the present. Going on on page 30, he says, bottom of 30, top of 31, I would like to write the history of this prison with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present. Now I think there's an interesting distinction there between writing a history of the past in terms of the present, and then what he thinks he's doing. Writing history of the past in terms of the present to me possibly could suggest looking at the past as if it had the same sorts of ways of thinking and acting and being as we do today. Looking at the past through the prism of the present and what we're concerned about and what we believe and what we know. I don't think he's trying to do that. He's trying to look at the past in a more sort of authentic way of what was actually going on. But what could it mean to write the history of the present? What is he doing instead? I'm not sure I have a clear answer to that, so I'll give you a quote, which I think helps. It helps me understand what I think he's doing in this and other historical texts. So this is another interview. And he gave a lot of interviews. So there's lots and lots of information about what Foucault thinks he's doing from interviews. It's a matter of making things more fragile through historical analysis. Making things more fragile. So the things that we believe, the things that we do, the practices we have today, he wants to make them more fragile. I find this kind of evocative. Or rather, a way of showing both how and why things were able to establish themselves as such. So if you take history, you can show how and why we got to the point now that we have the disciplinary mechanisms we have. Or the reason why we have the prison system that we have. This can show that what appears obvious to us is not at all so obvious. I wanted to reintegrate a lot of obvious facts of our practices in the historicity of some of those practices. And thereby rob them of their evidentiary status in order to give them back the mobility that they had and that they should always have. So to me, making things more fragile, robbing them of their status as obvious, giving them back mobility. To me, this suggests that one of the things he's trying to do with history is to show, look, we now have this kind of punishment. We now have this sort of discipline, this sort of panopticism. But I can show you how it developed. And if I can show you how it developed, it no longer seems like it must obviously be the case. It doesn't just seem like this must be how we do things. And in other parts of the text that I didn't ask you to read, he makes it clear that he's thinking about imprisonment in that way. Why should it be that what happens when you commit a crime is that you get enclosed in a cell? Well, it's so many people that just seems obvious, right? That's just what we do. And of course, if I pressed you on that, you could probably think of reasons why we do that. But he tries to point out that that was a specific development at a specific section of time for specific reasons that we ended up locking people away in cells. And do we need to do that? Maybe, maybe it's a good idea. Maybe it's not. And if we can see how and why it developed, we can question whether we still need it and how if we don't, we might do something different. It makes things seem less obvious. That's one thing I think he's doing with history. And there might be more things you wanna talk about in seminars. Okay, another really important aspect of Foucault's work, I think generally, is the connection between power and knowledge. And we do get a quote about this on page 27 of the text. But it's relatively quick. And there isn't a whole lot, I think, that's obvious in this text about the relationship between power and knowledge, so I think you can get to it when you really think about it. But I did wanna talk about it a little bit more because it's really crucial to what he's doing. Here's 27, second paragraph, middle of the paragraph. We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful. That power and knowledge directly imply one another and that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations, which is a big mouthful and there's a lot going on in there. And in order to really get to that, what all that means, and I forgot I have this for first, we need to think about what power is for Foucault. We'll get back to the relationship between power and knowledge, sorry. So what is power for Foucault is a very specific sort of thing. When I ask you, if you had to define what power is, how would you do that? So-and-so has power over somebody else. This person has power, this person doesn't have power. What does that mean? If they wanted something, somebody else would do it for them. Yep, yeah? That they would be able to do things that others can't? Okay, good. Helen and then Farah and then here we go. Yeah, I know, I know. So quite often we think of power in terms of a hierarchy. So there's this person, there's these people, and then there's these people down here, right? And this person has the most power and these people are sort of the middle managers and these people are the powerless, something like that. I don't know if that's what you mean, but yeah, yeah, good. And that, and it's similar to a couple of other things that people have said is gonna come up in what he thinks power is. It's very much a matter of influencing other people. Okay, the one thing that I think that we often, or we might think about power, and I don't know how often people think this, but I have thought about it in the past, is it's something that one person has and another person doesn't, or it's more like this hierarchy. And that's the one thing that for Foucault is a little bit more complicated, that everybody has a certain degree of power, and it's not that there's the powerful and the powerless. So these are a couple quotes from, the first one is from another book of his, the second one is from discipline and punish. Power is not a thing, it is a relationship. So he's always talking about a relationship between two people, which is important because it can easily get reversed. It can easily be overturned. Well, sometimes more easily than other times. So it's a relationship between two individuals, such that one can direct the behavior of another or determine the behavior of another. So that's a nice kind of succinct discussion of what power is. And then in our book, on page 26, one should decipher in power a network of relations. And I have a picture of this on another slide, a network of relations. Constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess. So this idea of a privilege that one might possess is something like this picture or this hierarchy. So the one on top has power, it's possessed by that person. The one below is powerless, they don't have it. But Foucault wants to think about power as rather in the relationship between the two people. And that relationship can actually be very fluid. So the relations are constantly in tension, in activity, rather than something that one person has and the other person doesn't. So it's not so much having power or not having power, that's not exactly the picture. It's more this connection between two people where one tries to direct the behavior of the other. But this other part is also part of the relationship and also very crucial. The second person can comply or not. Or they can reverse the power relation. And I don't have to quote with me, but Foucault in an interview says to the interviewer, something like, look, in our relationship right now, you and me, you're interviewing me. I'm older than you, you're younger than me. In some ways, I have power because I'm the scholar, I'm the intellectual. But in other ways, I might feel like you have power over me because you're younger and you're actually in charge of the interview. And it's not clear necessarily that one person is the powerful and the other is the powerless. And these senses of who's powerful and who's not and who's directing the behavior of the other and who's not can easily switch quickly from moment to moment. So it's quite complicated actually in Foucault's view of what power is. This next image is that sort of network of power relations. And he says power is everywhere. This is another interview. In human relationships, whether they involve verbal communication or amorous, institutional or economic relationships, power is always present. Elsewhere he says, look, we just, you can't get away from power relationships. You're always in a power relationship of one type or another. In a love relationship, in a friendship, teachers and students, obviously your boss versus you, obviously the government, et cetera, but all over. I mean a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other. If you define power that way, it's everywhere, right? Another nice quote. Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power. And there was also, I think a nice quote on page 27 of here. Yeah, it's not quite as clear as these interviews, which is why I didn't put it on the screen. Page 27 in the first paragraph, talking about power at the top of the paragraph. This power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who do not have it. That's why you put that in quotation marks, who do not have it, because everybody has some, really. We're all in many kinds of power relations. It invests them and is transmitted by them and through them. It exerts pressure upon them just as they themselves in their struggle against it, resists the grip it has on them. So we're always in one side or the other of a power relation. We can try to control other people or we can try to resist. This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society. They are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and they do not merely reproduce at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behavior, the general form of the law or government. So there's many different kinds of power relations than they are in all of our relationships. Okay, now we get to power knowledge, which is that quote that I read you earlier from Discipline and Punish, page 27. So on page 27 and also in this quote from another interview, we've got this notion that truth and power, excuse me, truth and knowledge are linked in a circular relationship with systems of power and I wanna ask you if this makes sense to you. And it also comes from that quote on page 27. So on one side, I've got power relations, recognizing that those are huge. That can be all kinds of things, right? Not just the government or the police, but all sorts of power relations. And on the other side, all kinds of knowledge and anything that counts as true, what we would call the truth in any sort of context. And his claim is that truth and knowledge are linked in this kind of reciprocal relationship. So on page 27, again, just to bring that back up. Power produces knowledge. Power and knowledge directly imply one another. There's no power relationship without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. So I've got this and then I've got it going the other way. So power relations produce knowledge and what is knowledge, what has come out of whatever process we get for knowledge affects power relations. Now, I wanna ask you about that. The top parts, how can we think any examples of how what counts as knowledge, what counts as truth is produced through relationships that are relationships of power? Yeah. Career training, can you explain? Right, okay, good. Yes, yes, yes, which does happen quite often. So who gets to claim what counts as true about a certain event? It may be because they're the ones who ended up on top somehow, right? They're the ones who have the power to make that true. What else? What counts as knowledge or truth come from relationships of power? Yes, yeah, okay, good. Yep, yes, yes, good. And so that's sort of coming, well it's actually coming from the other picture where the person who is the underdog at the moment in that relationship can resist and say no, that's actually not the truth. I mean, I know you're claiming it's the truth and from your position, you're the one who's saying I am the one with the truth, but I'm going to resist that. Yeah, remember? Okay, explain. Yes. And Prospero also trying to control Miranda's knowledge, right, this is what has happened. You remember that? Oh, you shouldn't be remembering that. Let me tell you how it really has been, right? Yeah. So in other works, Foucault takes us quite far and argues, not in this text, but in some of his earlier works, he argues that what gets to count as truth, what sort of procedures we use to say this piece of these statements are true is something that can change over time. So now we have the scientific method is one of the big ways that we think of as providing truth, but that of course had a certain history and wasn't always the case. What counted as true had to go through a different sort of procedure before we developed the scientific method. In this book, we do see him talking about truth of the criminal's guilt being produced through torture, right? So how did we know the criminal was guilty because we torture him and we get him to confess, right? And that it provides the truth, among other ways to show the truth, which is not how we provide the truth of the crime today. The fact that these things change over time, Foucault is not necessarily saying they're all equally good, whatever means you wanna use for truth is fine. What he's trying to point out though is that in each one of those changes and in whatever way we now think we should be producing truth, there are always certain elements of power going on, right? So how was it that we changed from one to the other and who is in charge of those changes and in what sense might those people who are in charge of the changes be benefiting by now we do it this way, right? So he's often looking at not necessarily what's true or false, but in what ways are power relations embedded in what we count as true or false or the procedures we use to count something as true or false. So because I'm an academic, I can't help with thinking of this in academic ways, but for example, one of the ways we produce truth in academia, at least in the humanities, I'm not familiar with a lot of the other areas, is to write journal articles that get peer reviewed and published in journals that are considered very good journals, right? And we have these whole metrics about which journals are good and which journals are not good. And the question is, does that mean everything that's produced is false because there's power relations involved in which journal you get your article published in, but rather just recognizing that that means of producing truth has certain power relations involved. There might be other means of producing truth that could be better in terms of truth or not. It too would have certain power relations involved, right? So that's the kind of thing that Foucault is looking at. And you can think about that in terms of this text too. You can think about the ways in which he's discussing what starts to count as knowledge about people, about crimes, about punishments and in what ways he's saying that's actually affected very significantly by the power relations that are happening. I think the other way, the bottom part is more clear, at least to me, knowledge and truth, what counts as knowledge and what counts as truth affect power relations or themselves actually involve us in power relations. Because if something is said to be true, is said to be right, is said to be knowledge, that can affect how people act, right? Just even that in itself is a means of engaging in power. Okay, let's just move on to resistance because this all sounds very depressing. Power is everywhere, power is controlling the actions of other people, but that second bubble that I had on the slide, which I'm gonna have again here because it's so important, is also really critical. What does the other person do? And Foucault says, in an interview again, there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. I can't remember what quotes I have on here and what I'm gonna read. Okay, okay, so here's this picture again. There's always a relationship. It's not just one person has power. There's always a relationship and in that relationship, the second person can comply or not, can resist, can reverse or otherwise change the power relation. And Foucault insists that this is always the case in relations of power. Now, in some of them, it's harder than in others. But here's a nice quote, a couple of nice quotes. Again, from other interviews. We always have the possibility of changing the situation whenever we're in a power relationship with somebody. We cannot jump outside the situation and there's no point where you are free from all power relations. So they're everywhere, there's no point at which you're free from all of them. But you can always change it. What I've said does not mean that we're always trapped, but instead that we're always free. Well, anyway, that there is always the possibility of changing it. And then again, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up. So not only is he a theorist who talks a great deal about power relations and how they link up to what we count as knowledge and truth, but he's also quite emphasizing, thinking it's very important to talk about the ways in which we can resist. Now I'm not sure that's as clear in this book as it might be in some of his other books. And partly that's because again, with his role as an intellectual, he's not here to tell us how to resist. He's just gonna give us the information. How did we get to this point? What's happening? Now if we want to resist, we choose our own ways. But he feels in interviews, he has to keep emphasizing there are possibilities of resistance. I'm just not gonna tell you and direct you to exactly what you should be doing. He nevertheless recognizes that sometimes in some power relationships, there's not a lot of room for resistance. There's very little that you can do to really change the situation. But nevertheless, you can keep trying, right? And eventually, ultimately, hopefully, maybe not in your lifetime, things will change. I think this is the last section before we get into the text, if I remember correctly. If resistance is always possible, we do have the chance for freedom. Sometimes this particular book, when people read it, it sounds really depressing because it sounds like power is everywhere, discipline is everywhere, we're constantly being watched and there's nothing we can do. We even discipline ourselves to act in certain ways and we'll get to that in a minute. And it just feels like there is nothing we can do to get out of it. But he is also a theorist of resistance and freedom. And freedom does not mean getting rid of all power relations, being free from all restrictions. Obviously, that's not gonna happen given his definition of power. But instead, it has to do with, and this is not Foucault himself, this is a secondary writer on Foucault and Todd May. It has to do with understanding how we have been shaped, how we have been molded to become who we are, how the society has ended up doing the practices of punishment that it has. If we can understand the past and how we have come to the place that we're at, then we might be able to see what else might be available to us. Again, that notion of making things more fragile. We can see how we got to where we are and that it was a process and not obvious and not necessary. Now we might be able to think about new things and possibly work towards them. So it's a matter of remaking ourselves into what we would like to be within the parameters of a particular historical situation. We're not gonna be free from all power relations. We're not gonna be able to jump to a new utopia. We're gonna have to start where we are. Here we are in a disciplinary society. What can we do now? Well, we have to work within the parameters of that situation and see what else is possible, but we can do that. John Raktman, I think I'm pronouncing his name correctly. I'm not really sure, has this great book called Foucault, The Freedom of Philosophy. And he emphasizes that for co-freedom is simply endless questioning, endless resistance. Making a virtue of change, endless rethinking, fundamental questioning. So that it's not, again, being completely free from all influence, but it is taking those influences and those power relations that you're in now and questioning them one by one. Does this one work? Okay, I guess I'm all right with this. Let me try this one. Is this one good? No, I'm not good with this. Try to change it. Something else happens. It's not so great. I gotta do it again. Foucault himself says that everything is dangerous. Even if I change a power relation, things are gonna come back and not work again. It's gonna have to be constant. I'm gonna have to constant vigilance of whether I'm being too heavily influenced. Everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. Everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. We have to constantly be questioning and constantly be asking about the power relations that we're involved in. Yes, that's not true. I'm actually not doing that. So I don't know why you're saying I'm doing that. Let me double check. I think this might be the last bit before we get into the text in which case we can take a break, but in the meantime, this might just be a good time to take a break. Yep, that's it. Next is getting into the text. So let's take a break for 10 minutes. Come back at six. All right, so I'm gonna try to cover. I'm gonna try to talk about the things that I think are most important in terms of our theme, but also just in terms of understanding the text more generally, in the next 15 minutes, and we'll see how far that gets. I don't know, I haven't timed this section, so we'll see. But I'm calling it spectacle and surveillance because I think one of the important parts of this text is that in part one, he's talking about the spectacle of sovereign power through the public execution. And then in part three, we get much more focused on surveillance and panopticism. And I think both of them obviously are related to our theme of seeing and knowing. It starts off this text in a very memorable way, I think, with the execution of Damien, I'm not sure exactly my French is, as I have said, mediocre, in 1757. And just a quick search on Wikipedia. He was somebody who was possibly mentally unstable, possibly had a political reason, but attempted very badly to kill Louis XV in 1757. He ran past his guards and stabbed him with a pen knife, but it was so small and the king had so many layers of clothing on that it went in maybe less than half an inch, according to Wikipedia. So it really did almost nothing, right? And honestly, he bled a little bit and that was kind of it. But you don't attack the king. I mean, this is the king of France, right? You do not do that. So what we end up with is this really amazingly horrible torture and death. Sort of over the top, really, and I'm sure that's why he picked it. There are other deaths of people who've done terrible things that are less bad, perhaps, than that. So we've got on the one hand that image and the picture on the left is actually an image from Wikimedia Commons, I believe, that says it's an image, a drawing of that particular execution. So that's supposed to be him being pulled apart by horses and the far distance. And then on the right is just a couple of images about timetables and clocking things at exact times because that is the other image that he starts with. Néan-Foché, 80 years later, drew up his rules for the house of young prisoners in Paris. And then on pages six and seven, we've got this very careful timetable of exactly what will happen at exactly which minute and how long people will take to do those things. And then elsewhere in the text, of course, too, he talks about ringing a bell at X number of minutes and the children will do this. And then when the bell rings again, they will do something else. So we've got these two juxtaposed situations of punishment, right? The first one, a very gruesome public execution. The second one for young prisoners in Paris in an enclosed institution that has to do with time. Now, I wanted to ask you, what does it do to start the text with these two situations, with these two kind of anecdotes, really? How did it strike you? And why might he have started it this way? If you have any thoughts on that? Given all the things that you've read in the text since then. Or how did you feel when reading about the execution? How did it strike you? Nobody's speaking. Yes, definitely. He wants us to see the major difference. And it's only in 80 years, right? So that's not even that far of a difference. Now, of course, it's not that there were no public executions in 1838 anymore, but he's trying to pick up on, he thinks there's been a major change in the practice of punishment between, yes, two or next, in the back. Yes? Yeah? But those are our real eyewitness accounts of what actually happened. Like, he's not just making this up, he's quoting. Yeah, which is terrifying. And at first I thought you meant, well, how many different ways are they going to kill this guy? Because there's this, and then there's this, and then there's this. But let's make sure we don't kill him because we still got this one, right? And that's, yeah, it kind of was like that. Yeah, you were nice. Oh, sorry. And then you can be next, but I think she was first. Yeah. Yeah. That too is a sort of contemporary account from 1832. So it's the descriptions that are being given by whoever he's quoting, right? But there might be a difference there. That's possible. I also think there's a bit more going on in that. Well, I'll talk about it in a second, sorry. Let me hold that thought. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I think that that transition from the sort of really horrific spectacle of cruelty, which, to me, that's what it is, horrific spectacle of cruelty, to people in prison having to follow a certain timetable, I think what he's really trying to focus on is what has happened in between because the second one is more like what we might see in a prison today. I mean, not exactly the same, right? We don't see this timetable quite as carefully in a prison today. But we also don't see people's limbs being torn apart by horses in a prison today. So what has happened in between? What sorts of procedures have occurred to get us to the point we're at now from the point where we were? And that helps us to see, well, maybe where we're at now is not inevitable. It's not necessary. It's not the only way to do things. That doesn't mean he's suggesting we go back to the public spectacle of horrific executions. But I think he is telling the history in order to make it more fragile, as I was mentioning earlier. Now the thing that strikes me when I read this, and every time I read it, is just this shock. I think he is trying to shock us with the first one. He's trying to say, wow, look how horrible we have been because he picks one of the most horrible executions there have been. I mean, there have been lots of them, but this one is really bad. And then he picks something that looks pretty innocuous. Well, now all we do is we give people a timetable and they have to work, and then they have to be in bed at a certain time, and that looks pretty innocuous. One response that people might have, and I think he wants to kind of bring out and question, is look at how much better we are now. Look at how much more humane we are now. That's true in a sense, and he wouldn't deny it. We're not ripping people apart by horses anymore. But that doesn't mean that he's not questioning the power relations and the possibility of them being still negative in the second example, and in what we do today. It's a different kind of power relation, but that doesn't mean there's nothing wrong with it. And in fact, to some extent, he actually I think suggests that the way we engage in punishment and discipline today is more insidious, more subtle, happens in more ways that might actually be scarier than having this sort of thing happen to one or two people. I think Robert said, Professor Crawford said, he was talking in his seminar today about how it would actually be better to live in the past as long as you weren't gonna be a registered, as long as you weren't gonna be someone who was gonna kill other people, because then you don't have all this discipline, you don't have all this panopticism. Maybe we're actually in a worse position than we were before. And I think by bringing out these two examples, he wants to bring out in the audience, oh, we're so much better off now. We don't do this anymore, but then he's gonna question that. Are we so much better off now? Think about your life and the ways in which discipline is in a lot of aspects of your life, and we'll talk about that. There was something else I was gonna say, where did it go? Okay, page seven. He does briefly mention what I think he explains a bit more in part two, which I didn't ask you to read, which is we might think we're now more humanized, we're more humane, we treat people better in a nicer way, but that's precisely what he's going to question. So on page 70, he gives a little hint of this, and then more in part two, which was optional. You didn't have to read it. Page seven, last paragraph. Among so many changes, I shall consider one, the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. Today, we are rather inclined to ignore it. Perhaps in its time, it gave rise to too much inflated rhetoric. Perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of humanization, thus dispensing with the need for further analysis. And it's that last part that I'm emphasizing. Perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of humanization, as if, well, we stopped doing that because we're more humane and we're kinder. He said that might be too quick. That might not be exactly what's going on, and I'll try to explain that briefly by bringing in some of the stuff that you didn't read. In the beginning of the text, he also talks about how what's changed between these two examples and what's changed from the spectacle of public execution to panopticism is an emphasis more on the soul than on the body. So this is just a quote from 16. Punishment should strike the soul rather than the body. And he actually ends up questioning this to some extent because he's like, look, it's always the punishment, even that we inflict now, even when we're imprisoning people, even when we're doing these timetable type of things, is still a matter of focusing on the body. It's just focusing on a body in a different way. But the other thing that it emphasizes is the soul, that punishment should affect the soul. And another quote, the expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations. So instead of, and you can see this a bit in what I asked you to read, it's more in some of the other parts of the text, but instead of just punishing physically, now he claims we tend to take punishment and discipline into other aspects of the individual, what he's calling the soul. The soul is a word that's very difficult to define and might be used in different ways. But I think the second quote starts to get to what he's talking about. It acts in depth on the heart, which, okay, again, that's sort of a figurative word. It's hard to understand. The thoughts, the will, the inclinations. So that we're trying to get to people's thoughts. We're trying to get to people's emotions. We're trying to get to people's inclinations, what they are inclined to do. And it's not just punishing their bodies. And that's what I mean by saying it might be even more insidious. It might be even worse, because to some extent now punishment and discipline affects our minds and our emotions, trying to shape them in certain ways. So on page 17, there's some good quotes about this idea of the soul. 17, about two thirds of the way down the paragraph. The big paragraph. Certainly the crimes and offenses on which judgment is passed are juridical objects defined by the code. But judgment is also passed on the passions, the instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity. Acts of aggression are punished, so also through them is aggressivity. Rape, but at the same time perversions. Murders, but also drives and desires. So that we're thinking about the criminal, not so much just as a person who has done wrong acts, but as a person who has a certain kind of mind, and a certain kind of set of desires and inclinations. So now we'll start talking about people as certain kinds of people, the pervert, or the cut-domaniac, or the serial killer. This is not just an act the person does, it's a kind of person. And that we have now created this whole apparatus of studying these kinds of people. And we have put people into boxes. This is what you are, this is what you are, this is what you are. And I'll talk about that a little bit more too. But I think that's what he's talking about when he says, punishment is now moved onto the soul. Even though at the same time, it's always gonna be affecting the body as well. Okay, so the first chapter is all about the spectacle of public executions. And here what I just wanted to emphasize is an interesting reversal of visibility, which he says himself on page 35, and I won't point you to the text specifically, but this quote is from there. A reversal of visibility from what we tend to do today. So what we tend to do today is what is visible in crime and punishment is the investigation to some degree, and certainly the trial to some degree, it's public, depends on what it is. What is invisible is the punishment. So we don't see what happens behind bars, right? But he says on page 35, it used to be the opposite. In France, as in most European countries, the entire criminal procedure right up to the sentence remained secret, that is to say opaque, not only to the public, but also to the accused himself. It's a place without him. So the whole investigation, and the whole deciding of guilt, unless they also wanted to torture the person in order to get them to confess, was held in secret, but the execution was public. The punishment had to be a spectacle. Why? Because the whole point was to display the power of the sovereign, the power of the government, the power of the king, the power of the queen. So the more that you could show the grisly nature, the strong sense of the invincibility of the sovereign, the better, right? So this person, Damianth, who attempted to kill Louis the 15th, did a tiny little pin prick, but he had to be punished in a supremely, gigantically, publicly spectacle way, right? Because it was the king. You don't mess with the sovereign power. So quotes from 48 and 49. The public execution was a display of strength of the sovereign, of an invincible force. Page 49, its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play the dissimetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. Sometimes he calls it a theater, sort of a public spectacle, right? It's something that, it's a performance of the sovereign's strength. And what you'll have, quite often, are soldiers in this picture on the left. It's not a particular situation in the book. It's just a public execution in Paris that I found for free online. But you'll often have soldiers there, partly to protect the people from overrunning the scaffold, but partly as a sort of display of military strength. And I can't help when I read about the public execution as a spectacle of sovereign power. I can't help but think of Hobbes. Now, he doesn't talk about public executions directly, but this idea of the sovereign being the center and the one who is visible, whereas everybody else is sort of invisible, but what we should be seeing is the sovereign somehow reminds me of Hobbes, and it especially reminds me of this picture from the frontispiece, only because in the image at the top, the one who is important, the one who is visible is the sovereign, and everybody else is just this little tiny bit who's making up the body, right, whatever. They're not the important ones. They're not the ones that we think about. They're not the visible ones. Now, this is true to an extent in the public execution, because Foucault also points out that the person who was being executed became themselves a sort of target of vision, a target of publicity. Oh, sorry, there's the soldiers. So the soldiers are there to show the power of the sovereign, but the person who's being executed, this is not a good picture for it. I couldn't find a good picture for it because they're a sort of public figure in their own right, in part through the speeches that they were giving on the gallows before they died. So here, the person is already being hanged, but nevertheless, Foucault emphasizes that before you were going to be executed, you were given a chance and quite often expected to make a speech before the chopping block or the gallows or what have you. And these gallows speeches, he said, became quite popular as literature, as pamphlets, as things that people would pass around. And it was partly because in them, you could see this person who maybe had repented. And so at the last minute became somebody you could pity. Or even if they didn't, Foucault says, the people still thought of them to some degree as heroes because these were the people who didn't bow down to the power. You could still see them as somehow standing up and I'm not gonna repent and I don't care what I did. You can kill me. And they became something like public heroes. So it wasn't just the sovereign that was visible. That was the center of attention. It also became the criminals themselves. And in fact, this started to become a problem. It started to become an issue with the whole idea of the public execution because the more the people started to feel connected to the criminal, started to see them as a hero, the less they were scared of the sovereign power and the more resentful they were of it. And this is part of the reason why, according to Foucault and his historical investigation, the public execution as a major spectacle went away. It's part of the reason. But I also like how at the end of the second chapter of the book he says, well look, we don't have these gallows speeches anymore. But the whole idea of crime literature, the whole idea of the criminal as someone, some sort of a hero that we would want to read about and the sort of criminal against the mastermind of the detective and that kind of cat and mouse game is still really popular. And you might wonder what's up with that, right? That's kind of interesting. And it would be a different reason probably than the people were interested in reading about those who were about to die. But since there was resistance by the people, the spectacle of sovereign power started to die out. Out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, the solidarity of the people and the criminal came out much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength. So people tended to feel more solidarity with the criminal than they started to feel afraid of the sovereign power or feel connected to the sovereign power like you're doing a good thing by executing the criminal. So this is part of the reason why the public executions died out because they actually weren't doing what they were supposed to. And Foucault mentions how people would start to overrun the gallows, people would start to overrun the chopping block, people would start to attack the executioner, especially if they didn't feel like the sentence was adequate to the crime or if they felt like some people of higher social rank wouldn't have gotten the same sentence as a person of lower social rank. They'd be very upset. This is part of Foucault saying, look, it's not necessarily that this whole thing about public executions died out because we felt more humane. It's not necessarily that. It's because it wasn't working as a power relation. It wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. People were resisting. They had to find something else, right? So it wasn't, again, that notion, oh, we're just so much nicer now. It was, we need to find more effective power because that wasn't working. And I think this next one is just the gallows speeches, yeah, which I already talked about. The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by this sheer extent of his widely advertised crimes and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. So again, back to those first two images in the text, the horrible execution and the timetable. We might wanna think, well, we've progressed. Things have gotten better. We're just more humane because there's actually no, we just wanted more of a stronger power. And in the second part of the text, which I didn't ask you to read, he elaborates on that. How the problem with the way discipline was handled or punishment was handled earlier was not only that people were resisting, but also that it was just sort of not consistent. Sometimes the king would give pardon. Sometimes they would. Sometimes people would get off from this court but not from that court. They needed much more careful and consistent power, not let's be nice. So now, 80 years later, and now I would argue, we have what he calls disciplinary power. So we've moved from the spectacle to what we're gonna get in terms of surveillance. Disciplinary power, Foucault says in this text, and I believe this is from page 137, was established in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. The disciplines became general formulas of domination. So sometime in the 17th and 18th centuries, sometime this sort of, this form of engaging in power relations to do punishment and discipline started to become more popular. And it involves a couple of things. This is what I think is really important about it. Dostility, utility from page 137. Dostility, to make somebody docile, to make them do what you want them to do, to make them quiet, to sort of keep control of them. Util, utility, to make them useful at the same time. So disciplinary power is attempting to make people both docile and compliant and useful at the same time. So making the body more obedient as it becomes more useful and conversely. So whatever we can do to make people and their bodies and their minds more complacent and more compliant with power relations, while at the same time increasing efficiency of production, for example, which is why I have this assembly line here, that's what disciplinary power is aiming for. And I picked a picture of an assembly line because I think about that as sort of attempting to create efficiency as much as possible. And yet, at the same time, a lot of these factories where you find an assembly line and people doing sort of repetitive motions over and over again, the emphasis is on obedience. The emphasis is on keeping them doing what they're supposed to be doing and not trying to do something different or not trying to question the structure of the factory, et cetera. The other aspect that I think is really important about disciplinary power that we now see more of is that it's a focus on details and we'll get that in the next couple of slides. That we're talking about a way of engaging in power relations that focuses on the smallest fragment of life and the body. You break up space into tiny portions. You break up time into tiny portions. You break up the body in terms of conceptually into tiny pieces and think about how each of those pieces is going to move. That's what disciplinary power does in a mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinites. And I think we see that more clearly in space and time in the way that disciplinary power engages us in separating out into smaller pieces of space and smaller pieces of time. So you're gonna start to, I think, to some degree think about here the panopticon, which we'll get to at the end, because the panopticon also does this kind of partitioning in space. The panopticon being a kind of architectural model of being able to see people and what they're doing at all times. And we get that in part by partitioning in space. So whenever you've got a situation of building or even a more conceptual situation where you're trying to break people and jobs up into smaller pieces, then that's gonna be the sort of thing that Chukko was talking about with partitioning and disciplinary power. So we wanna set up spaces in particular such that disordered multitudes, disordered masses are more ordered. So the chaos turns into an order. And he says, and this is around 143, 144, 147. He's talking about separating people so that they no longer are connecting in order to waste time in terms of a factory or in order to, in terms of a prison, in order to connect with each other and collaborate, to resist, or perhaps in terms of a school in order to waste time by talking to each other or in order to cheat by looking at each other. We wanna separate people into cells, into specific separate spaces. And the point in part is for more efficiency but the other point is for visibility. If I can see that you're supposed to be there and you're supposed to be there and you're supposed to be there and you're supposed to be there, I can easily see who's missing. I can easily see, watch that you guys over here are supposed to be doing this job and you guys over here are supposed to be doing this job and I can then make sure you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. So he says on 143, The point was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities and its merits. And we see this of course in schools, so I've got a picture of a school at the top where, you know, not so much in university where you have an assigned seat, but certainly in elementary schools, my son has an assigned seat. It's obvious where he's supposed to be, and if he's not there, she knows, because that's his seat, right? And people can be placed in those certain seats according to whether the students who are sitting next to each other are going to be productive or not, or if they're just going to disrupt each other, right? So we can move those seats around. We see it in, I don't have a picture of a cubicle, I couldn't find a nice picture of cubicles that I could use, but we certainly see it in an office space where people have their own enclosed cubicles, but they're still visible, right? Sometimes they're really enclosed and they're not very visible, but quite often they have an opening on the side, so anybody walking past can see if you're there and can see what you're doing, right? We see it in prisons quite clearly, so the front of your cell is open, anybody can see it, you're supposed to be there. And this picture here is just an office building, it's supposed to be my picture of cubicles, but it's not quite like that. So we've got partitioning in space. We've also got partitioning in time, I'm gonna put both of these up here at the same time. The idea is in disciplinary power to break time up into smaller and smaller units, so he says on page 150, one began to count in quarter hours, in minutes, in seconds. And we see that in the timetable in the very beginning of the book, so there's the public execution, there's the timetable, we start counting specifically minute by minute, but we can even break it down more than that. We're gonna try to, and this is the quote on the top right, break down each action into individual elements. The act is broken down into its elements. The position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined. To each movement are assigned a direction and aptitude, a duration. Their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. And there's a couple of great quotes about this, and I'm just gonna point you to one on page 151 in the military. And this is marching. Page 151 under number two, kind of in the middle of the number two paragraph, a little bit more towards the top. The length of the short step will be a foot, that of the ordinary step, the double step and the marching step will be two feet, the whole measured from one heel to the next. As for the duration, that of the small step and the ordinary step will last one second, during which two double steps would be performed. The duration of the marching step will be a little longer than one second. The oblique step will take one second. It will be at most 18 inches from one heel to the next. And going on and going on, right. And you can kind of see this in the military. I mean, they wanna make sure that everybody is carefully marching in the same way and there's something conformist about the military. But you might want to ask to what degree this sort of thing could happen elsewhere as well. Not just in the military. Where you take an action, you break it down into its individual elements and you make sure that everyone follows those rules specifically. There's also an example in here of handwriting and how they used to teach handwriting to children where you would have to have your arm at a certain distance from the desk and position in a certain way and this foot has to be over here and this foot has to be this way. And it's very, very careful and precise, right. All that is this kind of partitioning of actions in space and in time. The other quote, it is a question of extracting from time ever more available moments and from each moment ever more useful forces. So that you're constantly trying to break down every hour, every minute, possibly even every second to see what's the most efficient way to move bodies to get whatever it is you want out of them, whether it be producing something in a factory, whether it be producing the way you raise your rifle, it is quick away and efficient away as possible, whether it be something else. I'm running a little low on time so let me decide what I want to do. I think let's just move to the next one. Okay, so part of discipline is this meticulous focus on separating space, separating time, separating movements, getting people to be as efficient and docile as possible. But another crucial aspect of discipline in my opinion when we're reading this text is the examination. And it's also something that affects you in your everyday life as a university student. When he's talking about the examination, and this is the second to last chapter I asked you to read, he's not just talking about the examination like in a class, but he is talking about that too. So I've got two pictures here. I've got the examination of the bubbles that you fill out for a test. I've also got a doctor's office examining table because the examination as he's describing it as a disciplinary technique includes lots of different kinds of examinations. It's an examination in school. It's an examination by the doctor. It's an examination in order to show that you've achieved a certain level in your job. It's an examination by a psychiatrist. All of these things are what he's talking about as things that will discipline you and help you to act in certain ways. So the examination is a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. We can clearly see this with an examination in a class. It separates people, you get this grade, you get this grade, you get this grade. It also can classify you if you get the same kinds of grades over and over again, you become a C student. You can become classified in a certain way or you can become a problem student or you can become a good student. But the same thing happens with psychiatry, with psychology, with medicine. You are examined and you become classified as a certain type of person, right? Especially with psychology, maybe a little bit less with medicine. I mean, we can say you're a cancer patient. Well, I suppose that does carry with it a certain set of connotations. What is a cancer patient like, right? So as we'll see in another slide, we're basically creating types of individuals with the examination. We're not just giving you a grade. Over time, we're determining the kind of person that you are and tying you to that individuality. The examination combines, he says, hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgments. And I just wanted to define those two because sometimes typical speak by philosophers is a little hard to understand. What I think he means by hierarchical surveillance is this idea from page 174 to 175 of a pyramid of observation. It's kind of like this, where the surveillance that's happening is not just from one person at the top. It's not just one person overarching looking at everybody. Surveillance is hierarchical to some degree in that it's actually happening in many of the middle levels as well. The people who are middle managers, the people who are teaching assistants, the students in a classroom who are at a higher level than the other students, who are helping the other students. They're also engaged in surveillance. So surveillance doesn't simply happen from the top. It happens kind of from everywhere. Though he still calls it a pyramid, I think, because to some degree there's still a hierarchy of who has more power. But we can certainly see this in a lot of situations where there is surveillance. It's not just happening from one person at the top. And then normalizing judgments. When he says the examination, it involves hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgment. With that, this is how I'm understanding it. You're taking a norm that you want people to reach. And you say, look, ideally the norm would be that you all work very hard and you get A's on your exam and you write really good essays. But what we're gonna do is we're going to rank people according to how close they are to that norm. Which is why I have this little thing with five stars but only two are filled. You get two stars out of five. You get four stars out of five. You get an A, you get a B. And what we're doing is we're ranking people according to a norm that we would like them to reach. And that ranking not only classifies them, it also serves Foucault as a kind of punishment or a reward. The rank itself does that. So let me point you to where he says that. That's on page 181. And we do this with all kinds of examinations. So it's most clear perhaps in educational context. This is not my book, so I don't have my notes in it. I'll have to find exactly where it is. Okay, so it's under number five on page 181. The distribution according to ranks or grade has a double role. It marks the gaps, hierarchizes qualities, skills and aptitudes, but it also punishes and rewards. It is the penal function of setting and order and the ordinal character of judging. Discipline rewards simply by the play of awards, thus making it possible to attain higher ranks and places. It punishes by reversing this process. Rank in itself serves as a reward or punishment. So by normalizing judgment, what I think he's saying is that when we do these rankings, we are normalizing people in the sense that we're trying to get them to conform to a norm. And by the ranking itself, we lead people to try to aim for that norm. Okay, quickly, I wanna talk about individualization and then I think we move on to panopticism for the very last bit. So what I've been talking about is through this partitioning in space and time, through this examination, through surveillance, through this normalizing judgment, what we end up doing, Foucault says, is making individuals. We create individuals through this process. We set them out in their specific little places in space. We determine their ranks by examinations and then we say you are this kind of person. The individual is fabricated by the specific technology of power that I have called discipline. And a nice place to look at this and I won't read it, but I think a useful place to see where and how discipline creates individuals is when he discusses on pages 191 and 192, the idea of the examination creating this sort of document, this set of documents about people. When we are engaging in examining people in many different ways, we write up their history, we write up what they're like and they have this whole set of documents. And it creates of each person, he says, a case. So your case is this and your case is this and your case is this. And in that case, we can see all the aspects of you. Now you might be an individual. It's not that you are this kind of person and everybody else is also that kind of person. It's that we can try to figure out who you are and pin you to that, which is what the second quote is about. The examination is the pinning down of each individual in his own particularity by gathering all these documents from all these examinations that we've done of you over the course of your life, you become a certain kind of individual. But it is time, we are almost out of time to talk briefly about the Panopticon. Now the Panopticon, let me just jump here quickly and then I'll go back. The Panopticon I think in this last chapter of what we asked you to read is sort of the diagram of disciplinary power put into a building. It's like the Panopticon is not just a building, though it starts off like that and Foucault uses a building to imagine what he's talking about. The Panopticon as a building is a picture of how disciplinary power works. So the Panopticon is a way of thinking about surveillance. It's a way of thinking about examination. It's a way of thinking about this normalizing, hierarchizing aspect of disciplinary power we've been talking about. And it's a way of putting it into an image. But you don't have to think about Panopticism as only existing when you have a building like this. So the one on the top left is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which he wrote a book to try to come up with this idea of what a prison could look like. The one on the bottom middle is actually a picture of a prison that I think is now defunct. I don't think it exists anymore. And then one on the top right is from 1828, a plan for another prison. And there's a good picture in our book from Foucault of a Panoptic type of prison with the observatory in the middle and then all the cells around the outside. So there are buildings that look like Panopticons, but that's not the only thing that he's talking about. He's talking about putting all of what he's been discussing about disciplinary power into one image. And one of the ways to think about this image of the Panopticon and of disciplinary power is that distinction he makes at the beginning of the Panopticism chapter between the leper colony and the plague. The leper colony was a situation where you would try to exile, send away, cut off, reject the lepers and they would go somewhere else and you would forget about them. They are separated from the rest of the healthy people. The plague was much more a matter of making people visible, not cutting them off, not making them invisible, but making sure we can see them. Because in that section of the text in the beginning of that last chapter on Panopticism, he says that people had to stand in their windows in the plague and someone had to go around and see that everyone was there so they could make sure people weren't sick or dead and they knew exactly what was going on. So it was more a matter of putting people into cells, just partitioning them in space and seeing them, not cutting them off. So this idea of vision of the people as opposed to vision of the sovereign becomes much more important, which is I think the next slide after this one. Yeah. So Panopticism and disciplinary power getting back to our theme turns the visible from the sovereign to the subjects. And this is Foucault's quote from 187, traditionally power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested. In discipline it is the subjects who have to be seen because now the visual source and object are switched around. So it used to be, and this is my attempt to make it pictorially, everyone looks at the power of the sovereign. I made it yellow because it's like the sun, like Louis XIV, there's something with the sun king. This is bright, everyone looks at the spectacle of the sovereign. And now what's happening is what's going on in the Panopticon is dark in the middle because, and we may not have time to really get to this, what matters in the Panopticon is not that you can see who's seeing you, it's not even if you know that you're being observed in any given time, it's that you think you might be observed in any given time and you don't know whether you are or not. That's the value of this architectural image and whatever we might use of it in a conceptual idea of Panopticism. You don't know at any given time if you're being watched but you know that you could be. And that's why there's this black circle in the middle. Quickly, well this will be the last thing, what I just said, invisible visibility in Panopticism. And you don't have to just think about this again with a prison, think about it in your everyday life. It is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector, too little for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed too much because he has no need in fact of being so. The important thing is that you don't know for sure if you're being observed but you might be. And what does that do? It leads to conformity because if you're in a state of conscious and permanent visibility, this assures the automatic functioning of power. If you know you're being watched at any given time, you're gonna act in ways that you're supposed to be acting, that's the thought. And this then gets back to the original picture of the spectacle of public execution versus the timetable. In the spectacle of public execution, people didn't necessarily follow and do what they were supposed to do. They would overrun the execution. They weren't necessarily scared. They weren't doing what the sovereign wanted them to. In disciplinary power, if we think we're being watched quite often and being watched can be sort of conceptual, it doesn't have to be literal, we're gonna discipline ourselves. We're gonna start acting the way we're supposed to by ourselves. We don't have to be scared by this really nasty, horrible image of power because we're now doing it to ourselves. And I think that for Foucault is the scariest part of discipline. And that's where we're gonna end it because I don't have time to go through the rest of it. But thank you. I will send these to you. There's only just a little bit left that I didn't talk about.