Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the ...

INTRODUÇÃO AO ESTUDO DA CULTURA
Texto de apoio
Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir:
Naissance de la prison Gallimard, 1975), Translated by Alan Sheridan (1977), London:
Penguin Books
[Docile bodies]
The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was
born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its
subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more
obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a
policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its
gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it,
breaks it down and rearranges it. A 'political anatomy', which was also a 'mechanics of power',
was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they
may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques,
the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and
practised bodies, 'docile' bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic
terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short,
it dissociates from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an 'aptitude', a 'capacity', which
it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that
might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation
separates the force and the product of the labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion
establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased
domination. (p. 137-8)
[The means of correct training]
The disciplines mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of individualization –
as one might call it – takes place. In certain societies, of which the feudal regime is only one
example, it may be said that individualization is greatest where sovereignty is exercised and
in the higher echelons of power. The more one possesses power or privilege, the more one is
marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions. … In a
disciplinary régime, on the other hand, individualization is 'descending': as power becomes
more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly
individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather
than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have the 'norm' as reference
rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference; by 'gaps' rather than by
deeds. … The moment that saw the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the
formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took
over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting for the individuality
of the memorable man that of the calculable man, that moment when the sciences of man
became possible is the moment when a new technology of power and a new political anatomy
of the body were implemented. And if from the early Middle Ages to the present day the
'adventure' is an account of individuality, the passage from the epic to the novel, from the
noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the internal search for childhood,
from combats to phantasies, it is also inscribed in the formation of a disciplinary society. …
It is often said that the model of a society that has individuals as its constituent
moments is borrowed from the abstract juridical forms of contract and exchange. Mercantile
society, according to this view, is represented as a contractual association of isolated
juridical subjects. Perhaps. Indeed, the political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries often seems to follow this schema. But it should not be forgotten that there existed
at the same period a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power
and knowledge. The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an 'ideological'
representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of
power that I have called 'discipline'. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of
power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it
'conceals'. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this
production. … (p. 192-4)
Álvaro Pina

INTRODUÇÃO AO ESTUDO DA CULTURA
Texto de apoio
[Panopticism]
The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition.
The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of justice imbued
with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison,
with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its
experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have
become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories,
schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (p. 227-8)
Álvaro Pina