Work

Discipline and Punish

Surveiller et punir

Michel Foucault·1975·French

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Foucault's history of punishment, from public torture to the modern prison. The shift, he argues, is not progress, it is a change in the technology of power. The panopticon is its emblem: a prison design in which every inmate might be watched at any moment, and knowing this, regulates themselves. Power becomes internalized.

Disciplinary power has three instruments: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and their combination in the examination. With the examination, the body is caught up in a network of writing, of reports, records, and files, a documentary apparatus which captures an individual and keeps him pinned there, in his singularity.

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