It is the history of social sciences one of the main concerns of his work that could be included within French structuralism. He argues that history should not be interpreted in a superficial way, but that further analysis should be carried out. His thought has traditionally been divided into three phases: the archaeological stage (between 1961 and 1969), the genealogical stage and the last phase marked by the technologies of the self. The method of analysis used varies in each of them.
Foucault places Europe at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century as the founding moment of a new society, the disciplinary one. Although discipline becomes the most widespread form of domination, there were previously other forms of exercise of it:
Slavery: installed on a relationship of appropriation of bodies.
Domesticity: founded on a relationship of domination “constant, global, massive, non-analytical, unlimited and established in the form of the singular will of the master, of his whim”.
Vasallaje: through an extremely codified relationship of submission “which concerns less the operations of the body than the products of labor and the ritual marks of the vassalage”.
Asceticism or monastic type: they conform to guarantee deprivation and although it implies obedience to others, their goal is to increase the dominance of each one over his own body.
The birth of discipline, of the art of the body, forms a bond that, in the same mechanism, makes it all the more obedient, the more useful, and vice versa. Discipline thus manufactures subdued and exercised bodies, “docile” bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in terms of utility) and decreases those forces (in political terms of obedience). In a word: it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it makes this power a “fitness”, a “capacity” that tries to increase, and on the other hand changes energy, the power that could result from it, and turns it into a strict subjection relationship. If economic exploitation separates force and the product of labor, let's say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the bond of coercion between an increased attitude, an increased domination.
The disciplinary power of modern times inaugurates a silent punishment that operates with the aim of producing domesticated bodies. This new power technology obeys multiple causality. An economy boosted by the growth of productive forces and the demographic increase of the 18th century posed a double problem for the old continent: the illegality of the bodies moves towards goods (crime) and the threat of loss of control over the old criminal techniques of channeling.
The passage from punishment of the Old Regime to that of the Bourgeois order is not a more punitive humanitarian system but a technology commensurate with the new requirements, a capillary justice that will penetrate to the last gaps of the social body. What emerges is undoubtedly less a new respect for the humanity of the condemned... than a tendency towards a more subtle and finer justice, a division into narrower areas of the social body.
The process of organizing societies led to the reform and reorganization of the judicial and penal system that introduced the passage of inquiry, a procedure by which it was about knowing what happened, for a totally different one, it is not about rebuilding an event but something, or rather, it is about monitoring without interruption and Totally.
In the midst of these changes, prison will emerge replacing other forms of punishment - deportation (expulsion of persons, exile), mechanisms to provoke scandals, shame and humiliation, forced labour (as a form of redress for social order) and the punishment of the Taliban - with the function of preventing the recurrence of the crime. and to block the repetition of offenders through the confessed objective of correcting the convicted. But the success of the prison is not based on these explicit objectives but on the implementation of an effective technology of power, the disciplines: “set of techniques of body control that aim to a quadriculation of space and time sought, with the greatest economy, reduce the strength of the body as a political force and maximize it. as an economic force. From there on, an analytical, cellular and even apiary space will allow, within a complex and confused society, to locate, classify and, finally, monitor and punish, that is, discipline is a political economy of detail that produces “individuals” and makes this individualizing production a method of domination.
“Crime”, the object produced by the power and knowledge relations of the prison, makes it possible to produce a pathologized and morally devalued individual, since it blocked the desire of the popular sectors to commit crime.
Jeremiah Bentham, embodies this model of social vigilance by building this idea from a metaphor of society that calls it Panopticon, “an architectural form that allows a kind of power of the spirit over the spirit, a kind of institution that is valid both for schools and for hospitals, prisons, reformatories, hospices or factories. The panopticon was a ring-shaped site in the middle of which there was a courtyard with a tower in the center. The ring was divided into small cells facing inside and outside, and in each of the cells there was, according to the objectives of the institution, a child learning to write, a worker working, a prisoner atoning for his guilt, a madman updating his madness, etc. In the central tower there was a watchman and as each cell gave to it. while on the outside as well as on the inside, the watchman's gaze could go through the entire cell.
Through the metaphor of panoptism, Foucault tries to point to the set of mechanisms that operate within all networks of procedures of what is served to power. Panoptism has been a technological invention in the order of power, like the steam engine in the order of production. This invention has this in particular: it has been used initially at local levels: schools, barracks, hospitals... We have learned how to create histories, to establish annotations and classifications, to make the integral accounting of these individual data. Thus, as a characteristic feature of modernity, a disciplinary society, panoptic whose main objective is to form docile bodies, susceptible to change through three operations:
a. Continuous and personalized monitoring,
b. Mechanisms of control of punishments and rewards and
c. Correction, as a form of modification and transformation in accordance with the established rules.
Surveillance, within panoptism, plays an important role, since it is exercised on individuals not at the level of what is done but of what is or what can be done. Surveillance increasingly tends to identify the perpetrator of the act, leaving aside the legal nature or criminal classification of the act itself. In this sense, Foucault talks about the architecture of surveillance that makes it possible for a single glance to go through the greatest number of faces, bodies, attitudes as much as possible. Thus, the main task of surveillance is to “monitor individuals before the offence is committed” that is why the symbolizes by an ever-open eye.
Panoptism beyond being symbolized through the metaphor enunciated above, is embodied in the reality of the different institutions, in this way Foucault details how this panoptism exists at the simplest level and in the daily functioning of institutions that frame the life and bodies of the individuals - panoptism, therefore, at the level of individual existence. Thus the individual belongs to a group and the group develops in the various institutions that make up the disciplinary society, such as prison, school, hospital, factory etc. Such institutions are called by the author surveillance structures and all have: a common purpose to fix or link individuals to an apparatus of normalization of men; an objective based on linking the individual to the process of production, formation or correction of the producers that will guarantee production and its executors according to a certain norm and a common effect that is the exclusion of the individual.
Institutions should not be classified as State and non-State but defined as an institutional kidnapping network that governs the temporal dimension of individuals' lives and their existence. Thus, its functions focus on the control of time, based on the appropriation and exploitation of the amount of time and on the control of the body, based on a specific system responsible for training and valuing it. In this sense, Foucault affirms in this society. In the 19th century the body acquires a totally different meaning and ceases to be what must be tormented to become something that has been formed, reformed corrected, into a body that must acquire skills, receive certain qualities and qualify itself as a body capable of working. It is important to note that, beyond the fact that all the institutions that make up this network are specialized, the functioning of each one presupposes a general discipline of existence that far exceeds the purposes for which they were created.
Within the institutions of kidnapping Foucault describes the power as economic, political, judicial, and epistemological. The latter is understood as a power to extract knowledge from and about these individuals already subject to observation and controlled by these different powers.
There are several knowledge, on the one hand at the general level, which is extracted from the behavior of individuals, since from the power that is exercised over them is where knowledge is extracted.
And on the other, at a more particular level, we have the technological knowledge that is formed by the observation and classification of individuals, the recording, analysis and comparison of their behaviors and the knowledge of observation qualified as clinical.
Within power the author identifies the sub-power as a microscopic, capillary political power plot capable of fixing men to the apparatus of production, a set of small powers and institutions located at a lower level
Of all the institutions that Foucault uses to exemplify his discourse, he names the school within the pedagogical, thus “pedagogy was also constituted from the child's own adaptations to school tasks, adaptations that, observed and extracted from his behavior, became immediately laws of operation of the institutions and the form of power exercised over him.
In the first volume of the History of Sexuality he states that confession is installed as a fundamental practice born within the Catholic institution, confession spread its effects far beyond: in justice, medicine, pedagogy, family relations, love relationships, and in the order of the most daily, in the most solemn rites; crimes, sins, thoughts and desires, past and dreams, childhood are confessed. Man, in the West, has become an animal of confession.