The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline. In thus homogenizing them, effacing what may be violent in one and arbitrary in the other, attenuating the effects of revolt that they may both arouse, thus depriving excess in either of any purpose, circulating the same calculated, mechanical and discreet methods from one to the other, the carceral makes it possible to carry out that great ‘economy’ of power whose formula the eighteenth century had sought, when the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first
...more
