HOLLA! 11/15/09 (Sven Birckett)

The disciplinary modality of power, Foucault’s main theory, is based on a similar mechanism of power, that of Althusser’s ideological state apparatus. Instead of using ideology as the enforcer of power, Foucault believes discipline to be this unnoticed force of power. I like how Foucault used the “pantonic principle” as the reasoning behind his theory. It is more that discipline is a type of surveillance. This idea is the same as the purpose behind the Panopticon, built by Bentham, a perfectly structured observation building. A building in which its inhabitants are observed twenty-four seven without the knowledge of knowing so. “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 power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (99). Foucault’s quotation shows why it is important that individuals not know they are being observed or watched over. In other words, this comparison between discipline and surveillance as power was made to show readers that the “disciplinary modality of power” is just that. We are being observed all the time without knowing it and this surveillance is what keeps us in order and the disciplinarians in power. So how ideology is a superstructure of power in which we act on unconsciously, the disciplinary modality of power is also working on us unconsciously as we follow it and allow it to rule our lives. I think what sums up Foucault’s theory of power in a nutshell is that, “We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism” (101).