Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

by Michel Foucault

These two great ‘discoveries’ of the eighteenth century – the progress of societies and the geneses of individuals – were perhaps correlative with the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization. A macro- and a micro-physics of power made possible, not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that), but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of dominations. ‘Evolutive’ historicity, as it was then constituted – and so profoundly that it is still self-evident for many today – is bound up with a mode of functioning of power. No doubt it is as if the ‘history-remembering’ of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns and deeds had long been linked to a modality of power. With the new techniques of subjection, the ‘dynamics’ of continuous evolutions tends to replace the ‘dynasties’ of solemn events.