In practice, this often legitimises the mistreatment of these others in the name of correcting and helping them. And claims to knowledge advance the interests and power of certain groups while marginalising others. GoodreadsĮvery exercise of power depends on a scaffold of knowledge that supports it. This was a circular prison designed to lay each inmate open to the scrutiny of a central watchtower, which was positioned so that individual prisoners could never know when they are being watched. He used English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 Panopticon as a metaphor to illustrate his point. In Foucault’s view, new “disciplinary” sciences (for instance, criminology, psychiatry, education) aimed to make all “deviance” visible, and thus correctable, in a way that was impossible in the previous social order.
These institutions produced obedient citizens who comply with social norms, not simply under threat of corporal punishment, but as a result of their behaviour being constantly sculpted to ensure they fully internalise the dominant beliefs and values. In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that French society had reconfigured punishment through the new “humane” practices of “discipline” and “surveillance”, used in new institutions such as prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.
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