Discerning the social apparatus of power is the motivating force behind Foucault’s inquiry into the systems of discipline and punishment. Where power is located and how it is distributed are his main concerns. His methodological approach is to look at the genealogy of the Western penal system, and thereby analyze the shift, from the monarchal to the modern era, in the employment of power to society. At the center of his inquiry are not legal formulas or even abstract social theory, but the body. Thus, Foucault is interested in the effect of power relations on the human body. The body itself, it’s symbols of punishments, incarceration, disciplined gestures, all give evidence of the “political anatomy” and how pervasive the instruments, or technology, of power has become in the modern, industrialized age.

            Foucault begins by looking at the spectacles of torture and the body of the condemned under monarchal rule in 16^th-18^th century Europe. He depicts, with graphic detail, accounts of torture such as quartering, use of the guillotine, burnings at the stake, and dismembering of body parts. The tactic of these accounts is to show the reader that punishment and discipline and the power that produces them have moved from the highly visible (the King’s executioners and the scaffold—the stage of torture) to the invisible: the “carceral city” in which we all live with our bodies being regulated through its institutions of power that range from governments to schools. Foucault stops short of his all encompassing landscape of power at the doorstep of the domestic space, although he mentions that power in the cell of the parent-child relationship would be worth looking at as the basis of power relations. Part of this choice to avoid the domestic space derives from the fact that Foucault is telling the history of political power on, or over, the body and therefore remains in the public sphere. The public nature of torture, dating back to the Inquisition (39), is precisely what Foucault sees as power’s primary operative function as a means of punishment on the condemned, but more largely, discipline over the people. “And, from the point of view of the law that imposes it, public torture and execution must be spectacular, it must be seen by all as its triumph”(34). Therefore, for the law to be efficacious, for the King to maintain social order, the punishment must be seen.

            In the early 19^th century, however, there begins a radical shift in this thought. With the usurpation of the King upon the French Revolution and circulation of Enlightenment thinking founded on democratic ideals and humanitarian aims of social progress, the spectacle of the tortured body was deemed horrific and unfitting for a humane and just society; “By 1830-48, public executions, preceded by torture, had almost entirely disappeared”(14). Foucault questions how within a relatively short period of time such a radical shift in thought towards punishment and the theatricalization of torture could have occurred, even given the historical context of Enlightenment and political democratization. In fact, he seems suspicious of the progress oriented Enlightenment philosophy as evidenced by his analysis of the replacement of the tortured body by the disciplined body.

            In the chapter “Docile Bodies”, Foucault outlines the move to discipline the body by more discreet methods and suggests that its insidiousness lies precisely in its discreteness, or now hidden power of discipline. Foucault argues that the system of representation from the spectacle of torture when the punishment signified the crime established a system of “natural” equivalences. And thus, “by assuming the form of a natural sequence, punishment does not appear as the arbitrary effect of a human power… In analogical punishment, the power that punishes is hidden”(105). Determining which punishment was deemed appropriate for the crime during the reform of the penal system stems from the “natural” association of signs and signifiers that was established in the public displays of torture. This provided the penal reformers with two operative tools already in usage: (1) the need, on power’s side, for the public to witness and thereby learn the system of signs and signifiers for crimes their punishments, and (2) the perceived “natural” association of these codes. To recode, the reformers had to change the punishments (signs) that represented the crime (signified). They did so using the currency of public spectacle/witnessing even though now the spectacle was not torture, but chain gangs working on the side of the road, or prisoners in the mines, or even publicly announcing the criminal’s crime and sentencing. Foucault quotes Bissot, a reformer of the early 19^th century, on the new spectacles of punishment: “I propose that, from time to time, after preparing people’s minds with a reasoned discourse on the preservation of the social order, on the utility of punishment, men as well as boys should be taken to the mines and to work camps and contemplate the frightful fate of these outlaws”(111). The shift then is that of discourse—sign and signifier distribution via communication, both written and verbal—but the intention has remained the same: to show the naturalness of the relationship between crimes and punishments, and to do so through the public pedagogy of spectacle. Foucault himself states: “The great terrifying ritual of the public execution gives way, day after day, street after street, to this serious theatre, with its multifarious and persuasive scenes. And popular memory will reproduce in rumour the austere discourse of the law”(113).

            Bissot’s emphasis on work and the visibility of that work in sites where the prisoners can be viewed is an important ideological shift in the value of the human body and thus provides another reason, not positivist like the Enlightenment rational, why torture no longer was practiced by the 18^th century. The body of the criminal was seen as a commodity, as property, like the body of a slave. Another reformer, Boucher d’Agris, states, “The ideal would be for the convict to appear as a sort of rentable property: a slave at the service of all. Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate?”(109). Foucault uses this example to show the transition of punishment from torturing to incarceration and forced, “slave”, labor. The prison was built, thus, not only because of humanistic, Enlightenment concerns, or social progress, but because the condemned body had a new function. And this function was bound up in the economy of emerging capitalism and industrialization.

            The further removal of the spectacle of punishment from the streets and mines to the closed off prisons of the 19^th century was, according to Foucault’s genealogy, the product of capitalism and industrialization. To create bodies that would be productive in the capitalist system and be obedient to the laws of society, control had to become more organized and particularized. And so Foucault argues that the objective of particular powers worked together to create the “obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders…according to the general and detailed form of some power”(129). That power was no longer isolated and identifiable in the monarch, but it was nonetheless just as arbitrary and despotic (129).

            The move away from the visible signs on the body of punishment to the hidden body in the prisons—that were but one part of the all encompassing and yet institutionalized control over all bodies--is best analogized by the image of the panopticon. This architectural ideal of surveillance technology is used by Foucault as an analogy of the totalization of the invisible power over modern society. In the panopticon, the prison guard/observer could see the prisoner but the prisoner could not see him. This provided the perfect mechanism for truly observing the behavior of the prisoner. It also meant that anybody could be an observer and the effect on the prisoner would remain the same, simply that of being watched and thus acting correctly at all times. The sense of constant surveillance upon the condemned boy is Foucault’s point that modern society with the advent of industrialization had become disciplined by less physically torturing powers, but powers nonetheless that operated in a more controlling, pervasive and effective manner. Part of its efficaciousness was that it worked like a laboratory to produce knowledge about human behavior: “Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behavior; knowledge follows the advances of power…”(204). Thus power becomes at this point equated with knowledge; the more the subjects are known to the observer, the better he is able to control them. And thus the study of human sciences is for Foucault part of panopticism that characterizes modern life.

            The politics of panopticism means that a new body was created with penal reform that individualized and hid the mechanisms of power. The individualization happened by the totalizing surveillance of the individual—via the educational system, prisons, hospitals, governments, and the work place. All these powers implemented discipline over the individual and thus penetrated every aspect (individualized) of one’s life; “Fanaticism is the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline”(208). Foucault’s argument is that the penitentiary system reflected the power over society and so as the penal practices became hidden from public view and condemned bodies were put into isolated cells and observed by prison guards, so too the individual in society was observed in each of his/her compartmentalized, or individualized,  “cells” of modern life. “The carceral archipelago transported this technique [the penitentiary] from the penal institution to the entire social body”(298). Therefore, Foucault suggests we are all living in the “carceral city” because none of us can escape from the deep matrices of power relations that constitute our experience in daily life. And yet, he encourages at the end of Discipline and Punish that “we must hear the distant roar of battle”(308).

Until this moment he has carefully constructed an all-encompassing system of surveillance, knowledge and power over the individual. And if this system is so entirely whole—“The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside”(301)—then how can we hear a battle roar? From where is this resistance to come from? It seems that Foucault’s analysis of what power is, by looking at its history in the actions of civic punishment, is useful as a genealogy that gives insight into the mechanisms of modern life that govern one’s body, which informs the body’s actions, large and small. But as a theory of power, it seems too all encompassing, too panoptic, to be useful as a way of thinking about power in order to change unjust power structures. Perhaps, that is too why Foucault seems to diverge from the Enlightenment thinking on social progress and seemingly suggest that history is not necessarily progressive, but rather it is a perpetual system of shifting signs. Perhaps the beginning of resistance, the “distant battle roar”, comes from understanding what historical mechanisms gave rise to the codes of discipline and punishment, and thus through this knowledge gain the power to enable social change. Inciting this kind of direct action, however, was not the project of Foucault. His was a genealogy that locates and analyzes power. What we do with this analysis, this knowledge, was not Foucault'’s concern, either because he himself was acting out of resistance to Enlightenment progression, i.e. social change for the better, or because he is simply not a social theorist but an interdisciplinary thinker and analyzer of social matrices.