Essay - Foucault Quotes

From the reference - Foucault, M, 2001. Michael Foucault: Panopticism. [online] Available at: < http://www.cartome.org/foucault.htm> [Accessed 15th January 2012].
here are a variety of quotes which I have found to possibly include within my essay.

In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague.

the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning

They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible

Visibility is a trap.

He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.

The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.

one is totally seen, without ever seeing

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection

Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.

power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible;

The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.

Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind'.

In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact

its aim is to strengthen the social forces

And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the 'observers', who were paid regularly, the 'basses mouches', or secret agents, who were paid by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes.