Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1985, volume 3, pages 425-446

Power, space, and the body: a critical assessment of

Foucault's Discipline and Punish

F Driver
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EN, England
Received 27 June 1984; in revised form 16 January 1985

Abstract. The work of Michel Foucault has recently been subjected to considerable scrutiny.
This paper is an examination of his book, Discipline and Punish, which describes an historical
transformation in the exercise of power. The themes (section 2) and the significance (section 3)
of the book are discussed in terms of Foucault's conception of history and power. In the rest of
the paper, its implications are examined more closely, through four categories: 'institutions', 'the
economy', 'law and the state', and 'struggle and strategy'. Under these headings are discussed the
connections and contradictions between Foucault's analysis and more conventional Marxist or
Weberian approaches. Although Foucault's perspectives cannot be 'incorporated' within such
theories of power, they are far from being completely incompatible with them.

1 Introduction
"A whole history remains to be written of spaces— which would at the same time
be the history of powers"
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (page 148)
Foucault has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years(1). The
nature of his writings—their size, variety, and complexity—necessitates a broad
response in the form of critique as well as appreciation. But this is no easy task. In
a series of works written over a period of thirty years, Foucault has been attempting
to persuade his readers to escape traditional theoretical straitjackets and to abandon
comfortable disciplinary strongholds. Indeed, any discussion of his work and its
relation to other traditions runs a risk of falsely systematising a set of writings which
neither fits easily into some neat and manageable 'school' nor forms a progressive and
coherent ensemble on its own terms.
This paper examines a recent work—Discipline and Punish (1977)(2)—in the
context of earlier and later writings. Its precise themes have been subject to little
scrutiny outside France. Discipline and Punish (DP) is about a fundamentally
historical transformation in the exercise of power and, by implication, the use of
space. Foucault argues that power is intimately related to forms of knowledge and
that both are constructed upon the basis of concrete and local 'terrains' and
'technologies' rather than upon 'wills' or 'interests'. Power, for Foucault, enters into
and shapes all sorts of relationships, from the bedroom to the battlefield, and such
'micropowers' prove to be a condition of existence for more centralised or 'global'
powers. The geography of these micropowers, which Foucault calls a kind of
'geopolitics', is vital to their exercise (Foucault, 1980b, page 77). This term is of
more than passing interest for Foucault because space has always, in one sense or
another, been right at the heart of his concerns. Throughout his writings, Foucault
has retained a distrust of histories which revolve around empty abstractions such as

(1)
Several important contributions have appeared since this paper was first written; see
especially Cousins and Hussain (1984) and Poster (1984).
(2)
Where possible, I refer in this paper to English language editions of Foucault's works.
426 F Driver

the 'spirit of the age'; he has, in contrast, sought to indicate the significance of the
particular, the local, and its articulation with the 'whole'(3). But Foucault is
interested in space for another, more substantial, reason. It is not that he wants to
establish a general theory of space (or power, for that matter). It is rather that he
sees spatial organisation as an important part of social, economic, and political
strategies in particular contexts. In the modern era, for instance, Foucault emphasises
that disciplinary 'technology' allocates a special role to spatial organisation. The
control and division of space (and time) become a vital means for the discipline and
surveillance of individuals. And it is this process that is traced in Discipline and
Punish, albeit in its barest form: the birth of the prison.
Foucault's text has met with a variety of responses. His allies amongst the French
Nouveaux Philosophes heralded Discipline and Punish as a winning blow against both
bourgeois and Marxist conceptions of power and discourse. Many historians paid
tribute to his literary ability, while remaining sceptical as to his claims about the
'genealogy' of punitive techniques in the modern age. Marxists were generally hostile,
though some declared it a breakthrough for an altogether new form of radical analysis.
In fact, the book proved to be a major reference point for many philosophical (and
political) debates in France during the last decade. Elsewhere, however, its themes
have hardly been addressed directly outside what one might call 'radical philosophy'.
Yet Foucault, above all, would reject the label of 'abstract theoretician' with which he
is sometimes saddled. Within his work, one finds a vigorous championing of the
particular and the concrete, alongside a rejection of all forms of explanation which
seek to reduce reality to a single 'essence', such as the 'spirit of the age' or the 'mode
of production'. It follows that any attempt to reduce Discipline and Punish to a
set of simple theoretical ground rules will fail to recognise Foucault's abhorrence of
'totalising' forms of explanation.
I want to begin, then, with a detailed sketch of the basic themes of the book
(section 2). I shall then attempt to clarify its claims and their status, as a prelude to a
more sustained examination of its theses (section 3). It is necessary to proceed in this
way, I think, because Discipline and Punish is not a conventional work of either
'history' or 'philosophy' and it has to be read in the context of Foucault's earlier
work. Finally, I shall indicate some of the strengths and weaknesses of the book, and
its implications for contemporary social theory (section 4).

2 The themes of Discipline and Punish

In Discipline and Punish Foucault traces the evolution of a dramatic change in 'penal
style' which is illustrated by the contrast between the horrifying spectacle of the
public execution and the clinical detail of the modern timetabled prison. It is about a
new relationship between punishment and the human body: "From being an art of
unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights" (DP,
page 11). The paramount importance of bodily pain was undermined via a
redefinition of both the object ('crime') and the authorities which delimit and define
it. A variety of 'experts' now fragment the legal power to punish.
Foucault examines the development of eighteenth-century theories of penal reform
and points out their emphasis on the necessity of devising a new proportioned
relationship between crime and punishment. For Foucault, the true object of the
reform movement was not so much to establish an 'equitable' system of punishment
as to devise a new economy of the power to punish, a new distribution of its circuits,
"down to the finest grain of the social body" (DP, page 80). This proposition of a

<3) Hence his reluctance to specify fundamental 'determining factors': "Nothing is fundamental.
That is what is interesting in the analysis of society" (Foucault, 1982, page 18).
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish All

more constant and effective power to punish was described in terms of saving both
political and economic costs. The spectacular public execution was an inherently
costly and increasingly dangerous exercise for those in authority. At the general level
of principles, reform was justified by the theory of contract from which Beccaria, the
major representative of the eighteenth-century theorists, derived a whole series of
principles which Foucault labels a new "penal semiotics" (DP, pages 93-101). This
precisely calibrated system maximised the clarity of the law, the certainty of the
sentence, the rationality of the legal process, and the individualisation of the
punishment.
However, Foucault argues that this 'semio-technique' was superseded by a new
'politics of the body'; a great system of prisons was to emerge instead of the
eighteenth-century dream of a 'theatre of punishment'. How is this to be explained?
He examines the well-known model reformatory prisons of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and concludes that their attempts to control the behaviour of the
inmates (by regimes of work, exercise, and so on) were based on, and gave rise to, the
development of a knowledge of individuals. These 'models' did not represent the
ideas of the eighteenth-century thinkers, though they shared a common emphasis on
the possibility of the transformation of individual criminals, but instead acted as
'bridgeheads' to a quite new penal technology. In these prisons, the procedure of
access to the individual was unique: "It is in the technology of the penalty and not in
its theoretical foundation; in the relation that it establishes with the body and with the
soul, and not in the way it is inserted within the legal system" (DP, page 127).
Instead of representing crime and justice, the apparatus of correction functioned to
manipulate the body and its everyday gestures and even the soul, "insofar as it is the
seat of habits" (DP, page 127). In summary, it was concerned with exercises, not
signs, and its technique was to restore not the juridical subject, but rather the
obedient object
There thus emerge three punitive regimes whose features are briefly sketched out
in table 1. The third, centred squarely on the prison, is the focus for much of
Discipline and Punish. Foucault uses the phrase 'docile bodies' to illustrate the unity
of the analysable and manipulable body, the spring of 'power-knowledge'. Although
the body has always been the object of power, the new carceral regime proved quite
unique, in that (1) the scale of control was to become so minute and subtle
(individualised rather than en masse); (2) the object of control was to be effected
through forces and not through signs; (3) the technique of control was to be based on
uninterrupted and constant supervision exercised according to a "codification that
partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement" (DP, page 137). The
disciplines that made this possible became 'general formulas of domination', quite
unlike previous forms such as slavery, service, or vassalage. This was a 'political
anatomy' of the body, maximising both the utility and the docility of individual bodies.

Table 1. Three punitive regimes.

Regime Technique Object Function

Monarchical torture body ceremonial of sovereignty

Reforming jurists theatre of soul requalification of individual
(theory of contract) punishment as juridical subject
Carceral (politics training body and soul formation of individual
of the body) objects
428

Foucault then traces the development of four aspects of discipline; the 'art of
distributions', the 'control of activity', the 'organisation of geneses', and the
'composition of forces'. He examines the role of the partitioning of space, time, and
rank throughout the classical age and emphasises the growing importance of the
exercise, a technique by which repetitive and graduated tasks are imposed on the body.
The disciplines become techniques for use in power relationships of various kinds.
For example, he identifies a new architectural discourse concentrating not on display
but on control. Hospitals become machines to ensure better observation, treatment,
and ventilation. Furthermore, this 'observation' was at the root of a 'normalising'
judgment which distributed individuals according to their aptitudes and conduct,
pressuring them to conform. The medical or educational examination becomes a
technique for placing individuals along a whole range of degrees of normality.
A complete panoply of disciplinary techniques was employed in Bentham's
Panopticon scheme—a plan for a model prison institution proposed at the end of the
eighteenth century—and Foucault designates the discourse from which it emerges as
'panopticism'. In ideal form, this represents a segmented space-time, supervised
continuously and at every point, in which power is exercised without division and in
which each individual is constantly distributed, located, and examined; all this in
place of a haunting memory of 'contagions'—plague, crime, vagabondage, rebellion,
disorder. At the heart of the Panopticon is the optical-mechanical technique
whereby the inmates, in their cells at the periphery of a circular building, can be
observed by an observer they cannot see; they are always, potentially, under the gaze
of the prison governor. The Panopticon, then, is "a machine for creating and
sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it" (DP, page 201).
The model, in fact, becomes an ideal form of a very real mechanism of power,
effected through (not merely reflected by) a "concerted distribution of bodies,
surfaces, lights, gazes" (DP, page 202). Foucault argues that its simple efficiency
(compared with the exceptional and violent measures necessary to put down plague
or disorder in preindustrial towns) enables its generalisation throughout the social
body. Furthermore, Bentham's model is, in one sense, 'egalitarian', and thus in line
with the hopes of those such as Beccaria, since it "defines a procedure of subordination
of bodies and forces that must increase the utility of power while dispensing with the
need for the prince" (DP, page 208).
Through a gradual extension of 'panoptic' techniques a transformation from
exceptional forms of discipline (the scaffold) to a generalised surveillance is effected.
The new institutions—prisons, hospitals, 'well-regulated workhouses', etc—are only the
most visible aspects of a new discursive formation. The disciplines are taken up at a
time when changes in the economy and society require the production of useful
individuals, in numbers. Foucault posits three 'broad historical processes', connected
with the emergence of a 'disciplinary society', though these are not dealt with in any
great detail. These comprise the economic (a rapid accumulation of capital and of
labour); the juridico-political (the establishment of explicit and formally egalitarian
judicial frameworks); and the scientific (technological revolutions throughout society).
All these both enabled and required the disciplines to become generalised (see
section 4.1 below).
In the final section of Discipline and Punish Foucault traces the development of
'complete and austere institutions', in conjunction with the 'science of delinquency',
throughout the nineteenth century, and ends with notes on the 'carceral system' in
general. Foucault argues that the prison was born prior to its formalisation in the
legal apparatus; the model prisons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
only the first visible signs of the transition. The prison itself rested both on the
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 429

'juridico-economic' principle of the deprivation of liberty and the 'technico-

disciplinary' principle of the transformation of individuals via the disciplines. It
reproduces ideas of the social contract and mechanisms of social control found
throughout the social body. Foucault rejects the claim that 'humanitarian' prison
reform followed a recognition of the failure of the disciplinary model, arguing that it
proceeded hand in hand with it, in order to perfect a mechanism for the production
of useful and docile individuals. Thus sentences were not modulated according to
some table of 'exchange values' according to the offence, but in relation to the extent
of 'useful transformation' of the individual during confinement. The 'carceral'
transformation is here contrasted with a purely 'judicial' model of punishment; it is
the essential addition to mere deprivation of personal liberty and it is effected
through relations of 'power - knowledge'.
The carceral discourse, for Foucault, describes both the penitentiary technique and
the production of the delinquent. The twinning of these two features bears important
resemblances to his conceptions of sanity-madness and normal-deviant sexual
behaviour, though Foucault's case in this instance remains rather obscure. Foucault
argues that the vitality of popular cultures of illegality does not reveal the 'failure' of
the prison, as long as infractions of the norm can be isolated and defined (hence
'delinquency'). The existence of 'crime' is not necessarily a problem for the dominant
groups, therefore, but rather an opportunity. It is only when illegalities are
uncontrolled that danger arises.
Foucault concludes Discipline and Punish with a description of a 'carceral
archipelago', a society infused at all levels with a network of institutions and
disciplinary techniques. It is here that Foucault makes tentative comments with
regard to the widening of the carceral circle beyond the specific architecture of
prisons into a variety of institutions and processes which include schools, factories,
convents, lodging houses, and mutual improvement societies. Whereas the prison
transformed punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique, the 'carceral archipelago'
took this technique out into the social body. It is in the case of prisons that the right
to punish and the power to punish are most clearly developed and defended; the
right to punish justified through the theory of contract and the power to punish is
explained through the techniques of the carceral continuum.

3 The significance of Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish is, in some ways, a puzzling book. It provides no 'key' with
which to unlock the process of its construction. It is not anchored by great chains of
reference to honourable intellectual traditions. It presents us with minute particulars
when we expect broad generalisations and unexpected abstractions when we look for
local details. In this way it subverts the conventions of both history and philosophy.
An examination of Foucault's method is not the task attempted here, but it is important
to establish the status of his book before making further comments on its claims(4).
I shall therefore discuss, first, the style of Discipline and Punish; second, its links
with Foucault's more abstract works; and third, Foucault's conception of power.
3.1 Style and substance
The task of Discipline and Punish was an examination of the relations between the
manipulation of the human body and the exercise of power. In it Foucault shunned
the usual analysis of the birth and reform of the prison which cast it in terms of a
'humanitarian' calculus, the result of new perceptions of perennial problems.

<4) I am all too aware that what follows is a rather truncated account of Foucault's strictures on
method. I hope it at least indicates that Discipline and Punish is not to be read as an exercise
either in narrative history or in structuralist analytics (see especially Bouchard, 1977).
430 F Driver

Indeed, he talks of writing a history of the 'modern soul' through an investigation of the
evolution of a new power to judge immersed in a complex 'scientifico-legaP network.
What was at stake in Discipline and Punish was not simply an architectural history
but rather the type of calculus involved in the transformation of an old model of
incarceration, a chapter in the history of 'punitive reason' (Foucault, 1980a, page 33).
Foucault wanted to place the metamorphosis of punitive regimes in the context of a
'political technology of the body'.
Given the object of the book, two important (and related) features of Foucault's
writing fall into perspective—its style and its empirical status. Both are related to
Foucault's earlier explorations in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) which I shall
discuss shortly. The following points are made here as provisos in order to forestall
possible misconceptions. First, the style of argument. As Leonard (1980, page 10)
points out, a book lacking extensive notes and bibliography and which reaches over
three centuries and at least two continents without so much as a momentary textual
hesitation has not attracted favourable comment from empirically minded historians.
Even so, in Discipline and Punish Foucault employs humble sources rather than
grandes textes. He brings together previously unrelated areas of discourse (as in his
famous pouvoir- savoir couplet) and challenges a compartmentalised history,
conducted in the privacy of one's own prejudices. Furthermore, his emphasis on the
salience of micropowers (which reflects a resistance to totalising social theory) in fact
attributes enormous significance to details, minute technologies, specific domains in
the modern era. The disciplines themselves are described as "small acts of cunning
endowed with a great power of diffusion" (DP, page 139).
As to the second proviso—the empirical status of the claims made in Discipline
and Punish—things are rather more complex. Foucault rejects the empiricist distinction
between (neutral) 'facts' and our 'theories' about the world. There is no possibility of
a 'return to the past', only analysis of past discourses, their emergence and
transformations. Foucault recognises that changes in discursive formations do not
occur overnight (as is implied by his distrust of 'totalising' explanations). Spectacular
executions, for instance, do not disappear from Western Europe between 1760 and
1840, as the process of punitive transformation is not imposed from the top and has
its own sequences, segmentations, leads and lags. More generally, he admits that the
ultimate aim of the new discursive regime which informed modern punitive practice, a
system of 'noncorporal' punishment, could never be perfectly attained (even if it
claimed so: DP, pages 14-16). Nevertheless, he is arguing that the whole thrust of
punitive regimes in the Western world altered, and altered decisively, during these
years. The move between discursive regimes—from the image of an exceptional form
of discipline to a generalised surveillance at all levels of the social body—is a
fundamentally historical transformation, with its own patterns, sequences, and nuances
(DP, pages 209-216).
3.2 Archaeologies and genealogies
To set Foucault's conception of power in context, I want to give a brief account of
the relations between Foucault's earlier 'archaeologies' and the later 'genealogies' of
power, punishment, and sexuality. The Archaeology of Knowledge was a text
dedicated to anti-essentialism in the analysis of discourse. For Foucault, the 'search
for the origin' of things must be, in the end, a fruitless one. Historical analysis must
direct itself towards the contours of discursive practices themselves, towards the
utterances of individuals and the way discourses are constructed and reconstructed.
In the Archaeology he rejected certain of the ambitions of 'total' history, espousing
instead a 'general' history which would recognise the significance of series,
segmentations, and discontinuities in social life. The historian should not see the
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 431

document as a key to some wider and incontrovertible truth, a sign of something

else, but on its own terms as an integral element in discourse—as "its own monument"
(1972, pages 138-139). The task of the 'archaeologist' of discourses was to be an
analysis of what Foucault called their "surfaces of emergence", "authorities of
delimitation", and "grids of specification" (1972, pages 162-165).
The details of the scheme cannot be discussed here and, in any case, its
deficiencies have been recognised by Foucault himself. Even so, it does throw some
light on the method in Discipline and Punish, published seven years later. Quite
simply, Foucault is still concerned there with the problem of the constitution of
discourses (such as that of penal reform or criminology as a whole) and the necessity
of deconstructing some primeval link between them and a constituent object ('crime',
'madness', etc). However, the Archaeology was concerned with a master theory of
discourse: metadiscursive structures were said to govern the theory and practice of
several discourses. In contrast, in Discipline and Punish he placed the significance of
the 'human sciences' (criminology, psychiatry, sociology, etc) more explicitly within a
wider set of 'organising practices' which control human beings as well as ordering
knowledge. Foucault calls this exercise 'genealogy'. Both genealogy and archaeology
denied the subject a transcendent and autonomous position above discourse or events
(see below, section 4.4). The human subject, as well as those other apparently
'natural' objects—madness, crime, sexuality—was a phenomenon constructed within
discourse. Since The Archaeology, however, Foucault's conception of 'discourse' has
embraced more directly circuits of power, the way they call forth certain kinds of
knowledge or, rather, the way what he calls 'power-knowledge' is realised through
discourse. His recent history of sexuality illustrates this most clearly. As Weeks
(1981, page 7) notes:
"Foucault is not interested ... in the history of the mind but in the history of
discourse. ... The history of sexuality becomes, therefore, a history of our
discourses about sexuality. And the Western experience of sex, he argues, is not
the inhibition of discourse, is not describable as a regime of silence, but is rather a
constant, and historically changing, deployment of discourses on sex, and this ever-
expanding discursive explosion is part of a complex growth of control over
individuals through the apparatus of sexuality."
It is clear that this thesis involves a particular attitude towards the way power
operates in the modern world. It is to Foucault's theses on power that I now turn.
3.3 A new conception of power
At the heart of Foucault's recent work is an 'analytics' of power. The accounts of
this power, in Discipline and Punish and in his history of sexuality, are situated at a
level quite different from that of 'law' or even 'ideology'. Punishment, for instance, is
seen as a complex social mechanism with 'positive' (productive) as well as 'negative'
(repressive) effects. But in Discipline and Punish Foucault only provides a brief
indication of this approach (pages 23-24). Deleuze, to whom Foucault clearly owed
a great deal, has suggested that Foucault's work implicitly challenges five traditional
'postulates' which underlie Marxist conceptions of power (Deleuze, 1975; see also
Foucault, 1980b, pages 96-108). These were the postulates of class ownership (by
the bourgeoisie), localisation (in the state), subordination (to the mode of production),
its mechanism (repression), and its relation to the law. In their place, Foucault is said
to argue that, first, power precedes its manipulation by a particular class; in fact it is
more an ensemble of strategies, of tactic and technique, than the exclusive privilege of
one class. Second, Foucault does not identify the disciplines with particular state
apparatuses (DP, page 131) as they do not emanate from 'juridico-political structures'
(such as the theory of right) but from particular locally defined technologies of power.
 432 F Driver

Third, although Foucault follows the arguments of Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) in
rejecting the abstraction of modes of punishment from modes of production (DP,
pages 24-25), he rejects any simple economic logic. Instead, he is said to see power
as 'immanent' within particular fields of action and technology. In other words,
Foucault argues that the relation between power and the economy is far more
complex than models of 'functional subordination' or 'formal isomorphism' would
suggest (Foucault, 1980b, page 89; compare Urry, 1981). Fourth, the 'repressive
hypothesis', which presupposes some 'natural' phenomenon which is displaced through
force of action or ideology, is rejected. Instead, Foucault emphasises that the modern
prison is an institution for the production of certain kinds of behaviour: "The
individual is an effect of power ... and is the element of its articulation" (1980b, page 98).
Fifth, instead of seeing the law as a state of peace emanating from a battle won by
the dominant class, Foucault emphasises that the law is, in some sense, the battle
itself, the actual agency through which illegalities are created and challenged and
delinquency produced.
These propositions form the basis for the discussion in the rest of this paper. But
an important ambiguity needs to be noted here. Deleuze, and Foucault in places [see
especially his volume 1 of a History of Sexuality (1979) for general 'propositions' on
power], see 'power' as always inherently 'positive' in the sense that it does not merely
'repress' a preexisting object or subject, but that it shapes and produces particular
subjects. In Discipline and Punish (pages 210-215), however, Foucault suggests that
the disciplines he describes underwent a fundamental historical transformation. From
being negative and repressive (exemplified by the enclosed institution on the margins
of society) they became positive and central (exemplified by the discipline mechanisms of
a generalised surveillance). In this diffusion of the disciplines, the state plays an
important part, though the disciplines cannot be derived from it. Thus there is a
distinction between talking of 'power-in-general' and of the disciplines in particular.
Indeed, Foucault uses the terms 'analytics' and 'micropowers' expressly to distinguish
his historical investigations from a general 'theory' of power which would inevitably
carry essentialist or idealist overtones (compare Dews, 1979, pages 161-166; 1984,
page 73). What follows, then, starts from an 'historical' view of Foucault's theses on
power.

4 Debating Foucault: power and society

Foucault's conception of power forms the starting point for my critique of his recent
work. I shall discuss the implications of this conception under four related headings:
'institutions', 'the economy', 'law and the state', and 'struggle and strategy'. Each
section contains analysis of possible objections to Discipline and Punish, both in terms
of its historical claims and in the context of more general approaches to conceptualising
the anatomy of modern capitalist societies(5). My argument will be that, although
Foucault's writings remain deeply ambiguous in certain respects, his conception of
power and of its operation provides something of an escape route from the narrow
confines of essentialist and economistic forms of Marxism and points towards an
historically sensitive social theory. This social theory is by no means ready-made and
asks questions rather than giving easy answers. In particular, it has intriguing
connections with recent attempts to conjoin the analysis of society with that of space.
4.1 Institutions
In Discipline and Punish Foucault was concerned with more than, say, French society
in a given period, or merely prisons in general (1980a, page 33). He discussed
(5)
This is not to say Foucault's insights are limited to capitalist societies. It merely reflects my
own research interests.
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 433

prisons in terms of the emergence of a new type of calculus of which they were not
only a visible sign, but also its actual carriers. And although this new calculus and its
associated form, the disciplines, were to emerge in a range of other institutions-
schools, hospitals, military establishments, factories, etc—these are not to be reduced
to an abstract architectural type. As Foucault writes (DP, page 139):
"There can be no question here of writing the history of all the different
disciplinary institutions, with all their individual differences. I simply intend to
map on a series of examples some of the essential techniques that most easily
,. spread from one to another."
Each of these institutions had their own 'field of operation' and it is therefore
illegitimate to posit the Panopticon as a model of them all(6). In his book, Foucault
attempted to isolate a series of practices which infiltrate a variety of institutions from
the seventeenth century onwards. Clearly, it would break one of Foucault's theses on
power if the Panopticon was held up as the literal blueprint of the essence of power,
directly imposed on these institutions (see above, section 3.3). And although
architecture is accorded a special role within the discourse of 'panopticism', the
disciplines cannot be correlated with any one architectural form. Insofar as the
Panopticon scheme is a 'diagram of power' reduced to its ideal form (DP, page 205),
it tells us little about the specific functioning of the institutions which Foucault argues
were all more than simply disciplinary forms. In fact, Bentham's Panopticon scheme
was spurned by authorities in early nineteenth-century England (Himmelfarb, 1968;
Forsythe, 1984). Furthermore, it would be pointless to maintain that the prisons,
workhouses, reformatory schools, asylums, and hospitals of nineteenth-century
England represent perfect copies of Bentham's Panopticon, even though there are
plenty of explicitly drawn connections in the projects and propaganda of the period
(Carlebach, 1970; Crowther, 1981; Evans, 1981; Donnelly, 1983).
What connects these institutions, then, is the projected use of common disciplinary
forms to mould 'docile bodies' for a particular task through the drilling and training
of bodies. In the prisons, for instance, new techniques were employed in the
partitioning of space and time—the fabrication of a new 'moral geography'—though
not through the specific features of the Panopticon. The case of the workhouse was
slightly more ambiguous, though its development throughout the nineteenth century
cannot be understood without a conception of the much-trumpeted principles of
segregation (of male and female; of children and adults; of 'immoral' women from
the others; of lunatics from the rest; etc) and surveillance. But it is perhaps in the
case of institutions for children that panoptic discourse is found at its most powerful.
Witness the words of Kay (1839, pages 95-96) in a report on the 'training of pauper
children'*7*:
"The children are not allowed to read any combinations of letters which are not
real words, and are instructed in the meaning of every word .... Gymnastic
apparatus has also been erected in the exercise ground, where the boys are daily
trained in exercises calculated to develop their physical strength and activity, and
to introduce regularity into the movements of so large a body of children, to
secure prompt obedience to the directions of the teacher, and to maintain personal

(6) This is an important b u t neglected point. It is all t o o easy to pluck Foucault's account of the
Panopticon o u t of context. Most commentators, a n d even Foucault himself, tend to neglect t h e
significant differences between the Panopticon model a n d other institutions, such as the Mettray
penal colony which Foucault also discusses. In contrast to Bentham's scheme, however,
Mettray h a d a long a n d influential life (for further comments o n this, see Driver, 1985a).
(7) The school in question was a pauper children's establishment at Norwood containing over
1000 children.
434 F Driver

cleanliness and propriety ... . The moral training pervades every hour of the day,
from the period when the children are marched from their bedrooms to the wash-
house in the morning, to that when they march back to their bedrooms at night."
The trend towards separate institutions for children indicates a desire to separate
children, to train them before they are tainted by undesirable influences. Eventually,
something of a 'carceral archipelago' did appear: by the 1850s and 1860s, an
embryonic network of institutions for children—day schools, pauper institutions,
industrial schools, and reformatory schools—was beginning to emerge so that
discipline could diffuse right down to the most minute level. As Kay had commented
in his report on pauper institutions (page 96): "Propriety of demeanour in their
bedrooms and at meals is a special anxiety". The variety of schools and reformatory
institutions which began to develop in this period, and eventually gained state
recognition and aid, must not, of course, be reduced merely to the imperative of
'control'. Each had a special purpose and a particular method.
Even so, certain common aims were recognised. When Foucault talks of Mettray
(an agricultural colony for juvenile offenders established near Tours in 1839) as a
'model' (DP, page 293) he echoes contemporary assessments. Time and time again,
English reformers referred to Mettray as their example. There, supervision through a
system of spatial and temporal regulation was at its most refined. Every hour was
spent in useful activity and close records were kept of each inmate and his progress.
The colony was divided into a system of 'families' of about forty boys under the
direction of two supervisors. Reformers in England were deeply influenced by its
example: "It acts at once on the hearts of its objects with a sort of electric influence.
They are subdued almost without a conflict ... . No Mahommedan believes more
devoutly in the efficacy of a pilgrimmage to Mecca than I do in one to Mettray"(8).
It was not architecture that was paramount; this could be adapted according to
circumstances. It was the disciplines themselves, the technique for division rather
than association and contagion. Children were a prime target for training. They
were to be rescued not only from the city streets, those crucibles of crime and
pauperism, but also from other 'inappropriate' institutions, such as prisons and
workhouses, where they could inevitably be in contact with adults and irredeemably
'immoral' elements. Registers of conduct, systems of rewards, careful allocation of
times and spaces would accomplish all that forceful confinement could, and more.
The ultimate aim was self-control and self-regulation: as Sydney Turner, Inspector of
Reformatories after 1857, put it,'Tf you want show, follow the old plan of association. If
you want moral success, follow the new plan of family division"*9). The language of
contagion had brought forth a new 'tactics for the times' dedicated to the training of
the (actually or potentially) 'dangerous classes'.
As we have seen, Foucault does not claim that the disciplines were imposed
'overnight' and Panopticons sprang up automatically throughout Western Europe.
The proponents of change were influential, though we need to specify more clearly
the distinction between the automaticity of power described in Bentham's schemes
and the actual operation of power. The Panopticon was a particular mechanism, an
abstract figure, and the disciplines on which it was based would appear in different
guises in different contexts. It is a matter, then, of detailed research to ascertain how
the disciplines and the wider process of 'normalisation' emerge and evolve, for what
purposes, and in whose interest. As Foucault recognises, these disciplines were also

<8) Quote from a pamphlet by M D Hill, entitled "Mettray: a letter from the Recorder of
Birmingham to C B Adderley Esq. M P", published in London in 1855 (quote from page 8).
<9) Quote from a pamphlet by S Turner, entitled "Reformatory schools: a letter to C B Adderley
Esq. M P", published in London in 1855 (quote from page 2).
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 435

challenged and we need to know more about the tactics of subversion (compare
O'Brien, 1982). I shall return to these issues later. The question I shall now ask is
'What are the possible origins of panoptic discourse?'. This is a question that is
repeatedly asked of Foucault, though there can be no simple answer. I shall deal
with it under two headings: the 'economy' and the 'law and the state'.
4.2 The economy
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault's references to the 'economy' take two forms. The
first is in fact more of a nonreference as Foucault dislikes 'economistic' views of
power which accord it 'an epiphenomenal status'. These views occur in several
forms. In one, power is seen as a commodity which the individual 'possesses'; in
another the raison d'etre of power is located in the relations of production. Foucault
rejects both. However, Foucault does discuss the 'economy' in a second mode, one
which does seem to separate it from 'relations of power' (DP, pages 218-221). In
this section of Discipline and Punish, Foucault relates changes in the style of
punishment to economic and other kinds of transformation. It is a far from satisfactory
analysis and seems to open up the book to a charge of simple functionalism which he
wishes to avoid. Elsewhere, however, the impact of capitalism on authority relations
is only indirectly dealt with. Even so, it is quite consonant with Foucault's analysis to
argue—as Melossi (1981, page 192) does— that the panoptic inspection principle was
generalised and mobilised to control a 'rising proletariat'.
But Melossi and Pavarini (1981, page 45) oversimplify matters when they claim
that "the history of segregated institutions, of their prevailing ideology, can be
reconstructed from capital's fundamental need to extend its command". In contrast,
Foucault was keen not to collapse the differences between 'segregated institutions' for
the sake of a 'total' explanation. Indeed, the fact that factories, for instance, are not
'total' institutions, that when the factory bell rings workers are able to recover some
of their own energy, their own culture, has profound implications (compare Lea,
1979). Furthermore, this reduction to the 'logic of capital' seems to allow little room
for the majority of the population who are not incorporated as factory labour.
For Foucault, power cannot be derived either from the sphere of circulation (the
theory of contract, the juridical theory of rights) nor from that of production (the
authority of the capitalist). The question then arises: Where does it come from? This
question was posed by Poulantzas (1978, pages 67-68) who criticised Foucault's
insistence that power has no final 'source' and instead emphasised its asymmetrical
basis: power derives from class exploitation and from a more general 'material system
of place allocation' controlled by the state apparatus. Similarly, Callinicos (1982,
page 155) complains that Foucault makes the mode of production play second fiddle
to a metaphysical 'diagram of power' rather than the other way round. It would be
fairer to say that the concept of the relations of production is never far away from
Foucault's concerns and that to spell out all the intersections between Marxist
discourse and his own would lead to endless and unnecessary repetition. There is
also a more general case to be made concerning his relation to Marx's work as a
whole (Foucault, 1980b, page 53):
"It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a whole range of
concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx's thought and situating oneself in a
horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx."
Many Marxists have found Foucault's analyses, with their Nietzschian resonances,
difficult to accept, although Poulantzas (1978) echoes many of Foucault's themes in
his discussion of the spatial and temporal organisation of the capitalist state.
Indeed, many of the criticisms of Foucauldian analysis apply more properly to
his 'allies' such as Deleuze who have vulgarised many of Foucault's themes in order
436 F Driver

to attack Marxist doctrine (see Dews, 1979; Giddens, 1982). Put simply, Discipline
and Punish is about the advent of a new 'economy of power'. It is quite unthinkable
without some account of the social, economic, and technical development of
capitalism. That Foucault eschews traditional Marxist postulates should not render
his account useless. In fact, it does quite the reverse. On the other hand, his
conception of power does not destroy Marxism, as Deleuze seems to think. It issues
a challenge, one which has only recently been taken up (compare Smart, 1983).
4.3 Law and the state
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault is adamant that punitive methods and their
evolution are not to be reduced to changes in conceptions of law or of the state
apparatus, although they clearly overlap (compare Foucault, 1980b, page 158). He
repeatedly emphasises that the state itself rests upon relations of power and cannot
be seen apart from them. This position emerges from a rejection of the classical
theories both of the social contract and of Marxism. But Foucault hardly does justice
to the enormous range of Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives on law and the state,
many of which have undergone considerable revision in recent years (Jessop, 1982).
To deal with these issues, I shall divide discussion into two sections on the 'rule of
law' and the 'role of the state'. In the first I argue that Foucault provides a rather
misleading appreciation of the law in capitalist societies and in the second I
emphasise the necessity of extending Foucault's arguments towards the state apparatus
rather than leaving it as a mere residue of the relations of power. This will involve a
discussion of the work of Weber who also addressed the question of the relation
between capitalism, law, and rationality, though via a theory of bureaucracy rather
than through an account of the 'disciplines'.
4.3.1 The rule of law. One theme of Discipline and Punish is that, hidden beneath
the discourses of law, rights, and responsibilities (Marx's 'noisy' sphere of circulation)
lies the relatively hidden realm of the disciplines where useful and docile individuals
are produced:
"The real, corporeal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical
liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and
political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of
coercion" (DP, page 222).
Foucault here partially echoes Marx's comments on eighteenth-century models of
the social contract which brought together naturally independent and autonomous
subjects and obscured the social and historical constitution of the individual subject-
citizen and the "entirely different" sphere of production (Marx, 1973, page 83).
Foucault suggests that although the disciplines appear as a natural extension of the
demands of 'society' (the state as the protector of the rights and duties of man), they
are in fact a kind of 'counterlaw' and actually contradict the contractual spirit: "they
have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding
reciprocities" (DP, page 222). Thus, the discourse of rights and freedoms has the
function of effacing relations of domination in order to present them as legitimate.
The 'rule of law', for Foucault, seems to be merely an extension of this process
(1980b, pages 95-96). It creates the illusion, taken up in 'juridical' or 'sovereign'
theories of power, that individuals 'possess' power. The social contract is also, of
course, a mythical 'return to the origin', with significant ideological consequences.
The juridical-political theory of sovereignty is concerned to fix limits to the
rights and duties of sovereign and subjects (see Foucault, 1980b, pages 92-108).
During the centuries before the 'birth of the prison', it had been used to legitimise
various versions of the social order. Ultimately, it rests on the assumption that 'right'
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 437

flows from the question of sovereignty, from the relation between sovereign and
subject. Foucault's project is to reverse this mode of analysis, to consider power at the
very extremities of the social body, "where power surmounts the rules of right which
organise and delimit it and extends itself beyond them" (1980b, page 96). This
project is justified by the historical transformation which is traced in Discipline and
Punish: the emergence of a new 'economy of power' which is the antithesis of
sovereign power. As Foucault describes it (1980b, page 104):
"It is a type of power which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather
than in a discontinuous manner .... It presupposes a tightly knit grid of material
coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign."
A finely tuned calculus of power replaces 'absolute' (and inefficient) power.
Indeed, this "tightly knit grid of material coercions", this disciplinary power, is "one of
the great inventions of bourgeois society" (1980b, page 105).
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Foucault sees the persistence of a
juridical theory of sovereignty as an ideological mechanism(10). Whereas sovereignty
becomes democratised, the mechanisms of discipline do not. Encounters between the
two discourses—of right and of normalisation—characteristically take the form of
colonisation of the first by the second, as in the case of the medicalisation of delinquency.
In fact, the two fuse in the modern 'scientifico-legal' complex which administers
'treatment' as often as 'sentences'. For Foucault, then, resisting the disciplines by
recourse to the discourse of 'right' is a blind alley, since the two are integrated within
the general mechanism of power in modern society: 'power-knowledge'.
Foucault's analysis here is at its most problematic. Giddens (1981, page 172)
argues that it encourages an intrinsically negative view of the struggle for legal rights
and freedoms and thus strangely intersects with the 'logic of capital' theorists who, at
their worst, implied that all laws were, in the last analysis, functional for capital (see
Urry, 1981). Significantly, we also find in the writings of Pashukanis and Balbus (two
of the most eloquent proponents of this view) a derivation of the capitalist legal
'form' from merely the sphere of circulation and a consequent reduction of all law to
that of contract (Balbus, 1977; Pashukanis, 1978; see table 2). In fact, Foucault's
view of legal discourse is surprisingly simplistic, especially where he equates it with
the ideology of contract (see DP, pages 222-223). However, the language of
contract, with its insistence on proportioning punishment according to the 'exchange
value' of the crime, was never the sole element even within classical juridical theory.
The concept of 'mitigating circumstances', as Palmer and Pearce (1983) point out,
both undermined and saved such logic. They argue that Foucault overemphasises the
distinction between 'judicial' reasoning (focusing on the criminal act) and 'disciplinary'
reasoning (focusing on the criminal character). Furthermore, the prison is not merely
part of a 'disciplinary' network, but is also part of the network of criminal 'justice'
Table 2. Marxist approaches to theorising the law in capitalist societies.

Instrumentalist Structuralist

Focus class capital

Logic class struggle citizen as commodity
Significance of law content form
Place of law undifferentiated autonomous

(io) Foucault rejects the general category of 'ideology' when used to imply 'falsehood'. Even so,
he explicitly used the term in his discussion of the juridical theory of sovereignty (Foucault,
1980b, page 105).
438 F Driver

(the courts, police, etc). This network functions, at least partly, according to what
they term the 'juridical relation'—via a set of rules, rights, and obligations.
'The law' exists in many forms and guises. It is illegitimate to reduce particular
laws to 'law-in-general' especially where this involves a denial of the significance of
struggle over and through the law. However, the very word 'law' embodies a
complex array of ambiguous meanings. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Foucault's
usual sensitivity to the subtleties of discourse has not extended to a fuller appreciation of
the complexities of legal discourse. When he says (1980b, page 96) that "the system
of right, the domain of the law, are permanent agents of these relations of domination",
he extends his argument way beyond a critique of the juridical theory of power and
into a distinctly ambiguous position on the possibility and means of emancipation
(1980b, pages 105-108).
4.3.2 The role of the state. Foucault insists that the micropowers investing our
everyday lives and relationships constitute the conditions and means of power of the
state and its apparatus. In general, power is not built out of wills or interests, but is
constructed on the basis of the micropowers and their effects. This goes some way
towards explaining why in Discipline and Punish he virtually ignores the state. The
Panopticon is not placed in the hands of any such unified entity. In fact, Bentham's
scheme implies the very antithesis of the classical model of sovereign power insofar
as it cannot be employed in exceptional and arbitrary ways. The contractor-governor
of the Panopticon was to be subject to certain mechanisms of 'control'. These
included an obligation to publish regular reports, to admit inspections and public
visits, and to provide certain essential services (Bowring, 1843). In this sense, the
Panopticon is a machine which traps both the governor and the 'governed' by virtue
of its inescapable transparency.
However, this points to two problematic issues: the question of struggle (which will
be dealt with separately) and the position of the state and its apparatuses. Much of
Foucault's writing on these matters is informed by a thorough rejection of a state-
centred account of power. To the question, 'Where does power come from?',
Foucault concentrates all his efforts in denying a privileged site for the state (1979,
page 92). To be fair, Foucault does recognise that the state is in many instances the
agency of coordination of the micropowers, though he denies that power can be
analysed in terms of the state alone (for instance, see Foucault, 1980b, page 122).
This thesis is partly directed at what one might call 'instrumentalist' theories of the
state which place it above the relations of power. If Foucault is saying that to take
over the state is not necessarily to conquer the means of power, then we must surely
agree with him. However, Foucault has so extended his critique of state-centred
accounts of power relations that he obscures two elements which cannot be ignored
by any analyst:
1 the way power relations are reflected or, in Poulantzas's (1978) terminology,
condensed in the state apparatus;
2 the ways in which the various (conflicting) agencies of the state (parliament,
bureaucracy, etc) act through particular strategies.
These two kinds of analysis are approximately what the structure-centred
('structuralist') and action-centred ('instrumentalist') accounts of state formation
attempt to give us.
All this is not meant to deny the significance of Foucault's work. It merely points
to the demonstrable salience of the state and its agencies within Western capitalist
societies and beyond, and also the ways in which Foucauldian insights can be adapted
in the study of these societies (for instance, see Giddens, 1981). Even Bentham's
Panopticon scheme implied an extensive theory of a rational state in which the
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 439

'inspection principle' acted as a guarantee of the efficiency of social and political

administration (see Bowring, 1843). In fact, the scheme cannot be fully understood
without appreciation of parallel programmes for the reform of the space within which
the various panoptic institutions (prisons, industry houses, reformatory schools,
asylums, etc) were to be distributed. Concepts of rationality, utility, and 'transparency'
were at the heart of Bentham's plans for an alternative administrative apparatus and
inspired his attacks on existing systems of local government. In the real world of the
nineteenth-century English state, this challenge was not directly taken up. However,
in small though significant ways, the operation of power was taking a new course. The
establishment of bodies such as the Factory Inspectorate or the Poor Law Commission,
during the 1830s, was part of a wider process signifying the bureaucratisation of
social life. Although the much-debated 'revolution in government' of this period
might have been no more than a ripple in this long-term process, and established a
system that was minuscule in comparison with extensive modern bureaucracies, it
represented a significant departure from previous governmental practice (Roberts,
1960). It also had significant political consequences. The struggles over the new
Factory Acts or the new Poor Law of 1834 illustrate both the political and
ideological significance attached to these new kinds of social regulation and the
complexity of the 'revolution in government' as a political arena (see Dunkley, 1982;
Stedman Jones, 1983).
Foucault's critique of state-centred accounts of power is directed against something
of a straw man—the instrumentalist Marxist one (see table 2). Others, such as
Poulantzas (1978), argue that the state must be seen as embedded in social relations,
although the 'political instance' has its own specificity. However, it must be admitted
that many Marxist attempts to 'derive' a theory of the state (or law) from the mode of
production have proved at best abstract, and at worst sterile. They operate at high
levels of abstraction and cannot explain the specifics of particular circumstances and
events within the general category 'capitalist mode of production'. Concrete
phenomena cannot be 'deduced' from a single abstract concept such as the mode of
production (see also Driver, 1985b).
In attempting to follow through a Foucauldian analysis of the state-power relation,
I described above two possible modes of analysis, crudely labelled 'structure-centred'
and 'action-centred'. What concerns us here is a 'structure-centred' account of the
'condensation' of power relations in the state apparatus. This term, used by
Poulantzas in his State, Power, Socialism (1978), suggests an embedding of the state in
social relations rather than a description of the state as some kind of external
'cement' of capitalist social formations. Indeed, Poulantzas stresses that it is the very
institutional materiality of the state, its bureaucratic routines which closely divide and
specify space and time, that most accurately defines its role within capitalism. In
doing this, Poulantzas implicitly recognises a major lacuna in Foucault's work.
Although many commentators claim an essential inconsistency between Marxist and
Foucauldian problematics, I am not so sure that Foucault's work is fundamentally
antithetical to certain versions of Marxism. However, proponents of this Marxism
will have to examine the 'institutional materiality' of the state in far more open-ended
terms than hitherto. On the other hand, Foucault's account of the disciplines and
their manipulation needs to be more sensitive to the fact that they become closely
identified with the modern state and its apparatuses. What is needed, then, is a
closer examination of the relationship between power as it operates through the state
and power as it is practised at the individual level.
How are we to theorise the relation between Foucault's micropowers and the
modern bureaucratic state? One interesting route is through a rapprochement with
Weberian perspectives on legal-rational domination and the theory of bureaucracy.
440 F Driver

This is not the place to investigate fully Weber's typology of domination and, in any
case, fuller discussions exist elsewhere. There were three Ideal types' of domination:
traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. The second is most problematic and is
not discussed here. [See, inter alia, Rheinstein (1954), Bendix (1966), Trubek (1972),
Schluchter (1981) and tables 3 and 4.] Weber constructed an 'ideal type' of legal
domination in accordance with the necessity for the perfect prediction of the outcome
of disputes so that 'rational' calculation could rule social and political life. As opposed
to the other 'types' of domination (based either on tradition or on individual whim),
legal domination contains potent tendencies ensuring its survival and expansion.
Persons subject to legal regulation are 'legal equals' who obey 'the law' rather than
the persons implementing it. This enables the legitimation of legal-rational order.
Furthermore, the operation of such a mode of domination requires a continuous
bureaucracy subject to stringent rules which delimits officials' behaviour and
establishes certain norms of practice which function through written rather than oral
communication. This enables the organisation of legal-rational order.
At one level, Weber's argument suggests an analogy between capitalism and
legal-rational order. Their characteristic shapes share certain features: the autonomy
of form (commodity circulation and the rule of law) and the necessity of shared
norms (price mechanism and equality before the law). Even so, as with the famous
case of his work on Protestantism, no simple causal relations are posited between
'capitalism' and 'superstructure'. In fact, Weber recognised that modern capitalism
can and does flourish under a wide range of legal systems. English legal traditions, for
instance, are often contrasted with more codified European legal orders which do not
operate according to precedent but on the basis of principle. However, Weber argues
that both became increasingly concerned with the necessity of deciding legal disputes
in accordance with calculable rational thought processes, rather than on the basis of
political expediency or ethical fidelity. What defines 'legal domination' is not
necessarily a positivist legal theory but rather the existence of a consistent system of
abstract rules which has been intentionally established as law. This requires a basic
orientation towards a formal (or procedural) rationality in the law and loyalty to the
state rather than to individuals. Within this basic configuration, as Schluchter

Table 3. Weberian approaches to social order and legitimacy: the pure types of domination;
adapted from Schluchter (1981) and Trubek (1972). (Note: Weber's schemes are open to all
kinds of misinterpretations and require far more detailed examination than is attempted here.
Table 4 reproduces an example of the extensions which are necessary to table 3.)
Traditional Legal

Dominant authority individuals enacted rules

Legitimacy traditional norms rational acts
Judicial process empirical-individual rational-general
Administrative structure patrimonial bureaucratic
Calculability low high

Table 4. Two versions of 'legal domination', adapted from Schluchter (1981) (see note to table 3).
Legal system Ethical minimum Ethical maximum

Emphasis form-procedure substance

Principle continuity-predictability justice-equity
Autonomy high low
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 441

(1981, page 114) argues, legal systems are in fact subject to a continuous dialectical
tension between formal considerations (systematising the procedure) and substantive
considerations (the intrusion of ethical imperatives into the legal sphere) (see table 4).
Weber's scheme provides an opening for the study of the historical evolution of
the rule of law. His writings on bureaucracy are complex and diffuse, though he
clearly intends its requirements to mirror those of legal - rational order: constancy,
stability, predictability, and what Foucault would call 'surveillance'. The process by
which a state increasingly conducts its business through a legal - rational' system of
domination (with all the paraphernalia that accompanies it—anonymous rules, trained
and professional staff, etc) can be labelled 'bureaucratisation'. This specialisation in
the mode and means of administration has far-ranging consequences. As Giddens
(1981) has argued, it is intimately connected with the rise of the modern nation-state
system. This is not to argue that perfect bureaucratic machine-states actually exist. It
is merely to underline the imperative of predictability and control which is imperfectly
realised but ever present.
All this might seem a far cry from Discipline and Punish. However, Weber's
bureaucratic model resounds with Benthamite overtones. The Panopticon scheme
which forms such an important part of Discipline and Punish was only one amongst a
whole programme of legal, administrative, and social reforms which Bentham hoped
would function as a 'system of antiseptics' and would illuminate the dark and
shadowy structures which characterised eighteenth-century society (see Annette,
1979). As I have already noted, detailed research has to be undertaken before we
can say how far subsequent reforms resembled those urged by Bentham and other
reformers. The important point here is that the state was accorded a vital role in the
coordination and organisation of Bentham's panoptic schemes. Insofar as Foucault's
account omits this important point, his analysis is flawed. Equally, the fact that
Bentham's schemes were not automatically reproduced leads us to the question of
action and struggle.
4.4 Struggle and strategy
It is commonly argued that Foucault derogates the importance (or even the very
principle) of struggle. In the specific context of Discipline and Punish, Leonard
(1980, page 12) suggests that Foucault exaggerates the process of 'normalisation'
in nineteenth-century France, minimising the resistance of inherited attitudes, and
underestimating the role of disorder and conflict in the administration of institutions.
Certainly, Foucault's account in Discipline and Punish left little room for 'revolts
against the gaze' which have occupied other historians (on this, see O'Brien, 1982).
Furthermore, Foucault is said to ignore even the discursive critiques of bourgeois
rationalism carried on by clerical, feudal, and radical groups, as well as the tactical
resistances and insurrections against the disciplines. Some critics have gone so far as
to claim that Foucault effectively sees the discourse of the prison 'from the top' and
fails to appreciate the negotiations and frictions by which it was sustained.
This is echoed by Giddens (1981, pages 171-172), who argues that, in attempting
to rid his genealogies of a transcendental subject (the image of the all-powerful
sovereign), Foucault slips into a history without knowledgeable human subjects who
resist the power of the dominant classes. From yet another position, Poulantzas
(1978, page 149) criticises Foucault's neglect of the power of resistance. Indeed,
Callinicos (1982, pages 162-163) claims that Foucault treats the whole of reality as
a manifestation of a Nietzschian primordial will to power and hence rules out the
possibility of 'genuine emancipation'.
 442 F Driver

There are complex issues at stake here. I shall tackle the question of strategy
underlying references to struggle and tactics, rather than more abstract problems
surrounding the concept of human 'agency', though it should be noted that Discipline
and Punish is, in a sense, dedicated to the assertion that "the individual is not a pre-
given entity which is seized upon by the exercise of power. The individual with his
identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over
bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces" (Foucault, 1980b, page 74). As
Smart (1982) argues, Foucault sees the rise of the 'human sciences' in terms of the
creation of a subject-object dualism made possible by the extension of the disciplines
(as the term assujetissement implies) (compare Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). In other
words, academic disciplines such as criminology ('knowledge') cannot be divorced
from disciplinary practice ('power'). This relation is a complex one. Power is
omnipresent, but is not an "omnipotent causal principle" (Gordon, 1980, page 245;
compare Foucault, 1979, page 93).
I shall leave these problems on the relation between power and knowledge here
(though see Gordon, 1980; Smart, 1983; Dews, 1984). The question which remains
is how to locate the disciplines within a wider social whole. This has been partially
addressed in the previous sections. We have seen, for instance, that the Panopticon
was far from the mirror image of the real institutions to which Foucault refers in his
book; that history is made through action and contest and that the state plays an
important part in this; that the law has its own specificity and cannot be reduced to a
mystification of power. Where, then, does this leave the disciplines?
Foucault's 'genealogies' are only in a limited sense 'structuralist'. They are an
attempt to examine power relations implicit in discourse (rather than reaching beneath
discourse for a hidden key to its meaning), in local and particular practices, rather
than in inaccessible 'structures of the mind', etc. Power, in this scheme, is every-
where in the social system. In this sense, he agrees with those who deny that social
relations can ever be explained in terms of either the wishes of particular individuals
or the motions of structures to which they have no access. However, given Foucault's
insistence on the 'multiplicity' of power relations, it is notable Discipline and Punish
provides a guide to only one 'discursive practice'—panopticism. If, as Foucault
argues, the 'individual' is a focus for several practices, a relation of forces and
power, then it is necessarily erroneous to assume that the disciplines unilaterally
construct(ed) a self-regulating 'utilitarian man' who automatically internalises his own
surveillance (the logic of the Panopticon—see above, section 4.1). Gordon (1980)
attempts to clarify this point. Bentham's Panopticon, for him, is a 'programme',
whereas its effects belong to the domain of 'strategies'. These strategies involve the
articulation of various programmes with (1) each other and (2) the general features of
a particular 'terrain':
"What is important is to avoid merging the concept of the strategy into that of the
programme by way of the image of the grand strategist and his plan" (1980, page 251).
In other words, although Bentham might have dreamed of his plan as a perfect
programme for an automatic 'self-acting' mechanism of power, Foucault (according to
Gordon) is under no illusion that such a programme has ever been wholly 'translated'
into reality. As the field of strategies is necessarily a field of conflicts, the 'logic of
strategy' cannot entail a 'homogenous social whole'. Thus, for Gordon, Foucault's
approach assigns an irreducible role to resistance. Strategically coordinated power
apparatuses are seen as inherently fragile, liable to reappraisal and reversal.
However, Foucault remains reluctant to base his genealogies on received notions of
'struggle' (class or otherwise). In response to historians' claims that his approach in
Discipline and Punish lapses into more crude instrumentalist models of social control,
A critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish 443

Foucault admits that resistance to surveillance, 'revolts against the gaze' (which have
dominated so much of English social and labour history), must be acknowledged and
analysed, though in 'tactical and strategic terms'. To follow through the notion of
struggle, in more than a merely rhetorical way, we must examine the details, the
strategies of particular struggles, rather than collapse them onto the "good old
logic of contradiction" (1980b, page 164). Indeed, Foucault's work more generally is
designed to undermine grand assertions of the primacy and inevitability of the
'struggle' of the proletariat, and to illuminate the whole panoply of concrete and local
struggles which surround our everyday lives. Foucault admits an obsession with spatial
and strategic metaphors of power—region, domain, battle, etc (1980b, pages 68-70)
—and this is very much connected to his demand that academics take more seriously
the implications of the language of 'struggle' even though he appears to be uncertain
about the limits of such struggles or battles, which often serve to legitimise preexisting
power arrangements (compare 1980b, page 164). Certainly, when he talks of strategy,
he talks of the improvisations and cynical manipulations of everyday life. Programmes
(such as the Panopticon) are, rather, discursive forms and act as resources for
strategies. Strategies, however, cannot be seen independently of what Hindess (1982)
calls arenas of struggle (which Foucault would call terrains) and therefore it is
impossible to predict the outcomes of struggles by defining 'wills' or 'interests'
independently and in advance.

5 Concluding comments
"La tache du dire vrai est un travail infini" (Foucault, 1984, page 23).
Many problems emerge from a reading of Foucault's work. His notion of strategy,
as I have argued, is one of the most ambiguous. If, as Gordon (1980, page 255)
argues, Foucault assigns the facts of resistance an "irreducible role", this is by no
means spelt out in Discipline and Punish (compare Ignatieff, 1981). To be sure,
Foucault's work entails an examination of our own concepts of 'resistance' and
'nonresistance'. This involves an extended examination of how particular struggles are
actually formed, the shape they take, and the ways in which particular discourses
surrounding and defining them are constructed and reconstructed. This will also
involve a focus on the small-scale tactics and strategies of individuals and groups
other than 'the working class'. Despite the silences of Discipline and Punish on the
subject, such an analysis of resistance, or rather struggle, is possible, though it will
have to be constructed independently of what Foucault calls the "good old 'logic' of
contradiction" (1980b, page 164). This analysis would be conducted in terms of
arenas of conflict within which action takes place, rather than working with the
assumptions of much Marxist analysis: that the tactics of struggle necessarily 'reflect'
some wider social logic and that they emerge out of a clash of (predefined) 'wills'.
Foucault's work, of course, has been received in many different ways. It has
sparked off debates in a wide range of fields and these have often highlighted aspects
of Foucault's works which are marginal to his concerns and even his intentions.
Even so, I do not believe that a search for the elusive, original 'meaning' of
Foucault's various writings will necessarily be productive. My own concerns with
nineteenth-century English society or with contemporary Marxist debates over the
state have necessarily influenced my assessment of Foucault. Rather than hang on to
a set of dogmas (whether as 'Marxism' or 'Foucauldianism') I have tried to indicate
the relevance of Foucault's work for an account of the way in which power operates
in modern societies. To that end, the texts of Marxism and the claims of Foucault
both have something to say. In Smart's words (1983, page 73), we need more than
 444 F Driver

"a confinement or subordination of Foucault's work to the unquestioned parameters

of historical materialism" but less than "an uncritical celebration of that work as
somehow constituting a clearly defined and systematic alternative to marxist theory
and politics".
I have argued through this paper that Foucault's analytics of power should be
distinguished from a general theory of power. As Dews (1984, page 73) has recently
argued, although Foucault's writings sometimes seem to dwell upon the 'nature of
power-in-general', they are rooted in a highly individual 'historical vision'. We
should note, however, that this does not mean that Discipline and Punish is without
significance for theorists. In section 4, I tried to tease out the theoretical implications
of the book without constructing a general theory of power which would hold for all
times and places. It would, for instance, be wrong to criticise Foucault for "not
having a theory of the state", as his analysis is situated at quite a different level—the
level of the micropowers. In fact, his whole project has been to reverse the
conventional discussion of the state (based on a 'juridico-political' conception of
power, as in the early work of Poulantzas) towards analysis of the 'micropowers'.
Furthermore, he has hinted at the necessity of analysing the relation between the
exercise of 'micropower' (which concerns disciplines and individuals) and 'molar
power' (which concerns the administration of populations) (Pasquino, 1978; Foucault,
1980b, page 124). Even so, I have argued that in Discipline and Punish Foucault
simply fails to examine the ways in which the 'micropowers' were coordinated, the
ways in which the disciplines were used. Although Foucault has inspired interesting
discussions of what has been called 'governmentality', this area remains, unfortunately,
very much unfinished work.
Many of Foucault's comments on Marxism (including its theories of the state) are
oriented to only one variety of the species. I have argued, for instance, that
Foucault's criticisms of 'Marxist' conceptions of the state refer mainly to a simple
'instrumentalist' model which implies that as the state is the locus of power, its
'capture' will necessarily liberate oppressed groups. I have suggested that examination
of the 'institutional materiality' of the state would beneficially complement Foucault's
analysis of power and have indicated certain directions in which this could proceed
(following Poulantzas and Weber). However, I would not wish to obscure the very
real differences between Foucault and Weber (or Poulantzas). Equally, difference
does not amount to total antithesis (as some of the Nouveaux Philosophes have
implied with respect to Marx). It is a matter of dialogue. As long as we remain
open to such fresh thinking, our own academic and political practice will be so much
the richer. Indeed, Foucault has raised questions which the human and social
sciences can hardly ignore. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that they may
never be quite the same again.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank Derek Gregory and Chris Philo whose advice and
encouragement proved invaluable. I am also grateful to Tony Giddens and Shoukry Roweis for
their comments.
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